The fake Facebook profiles set up in the name of Bilawal Bhutto pushed the awkward relationship between journalists and social platforms back into the headlines in January 2008. AFP was reported to have barred its journalists from using Facebook or Wikipedia as sources — more precisely, from relying on either as the sole source for a story, which is a restatement of ordinary practice rather than a new rule. Corroboration from a second source predates the web by a long way.
Writing on MediaShift, Jennifer Woodard Maderazo set out the harder version of the problem: “Online communities — like villages and workplaces — are breeding grounds for rumors and speculation,” and the nature of the tools can produce inconsistent, incomplete and outright incorrect information. Her argument was not to avoid them but to treat them as resources, with common sense and professionalism applied.
That was already the working reality in newsrooms. In Vancouver, reporters at the Vancouver Sun and the Province had begun turning to Facebook when working on stories, racing to collect details from a profile before the person involved took it down.
The conclusion drawn at the time has held up: the tools were worth engaging with because they could strengthen reporting, but novelty was no reason to drop the habits that made reporting reliable — as Maderazo put it, “find the truth behind the story and check your facts”. Journalism was in a period of considerable change; the test of quality was not changing with it.