IS WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO SHARE PART OF THE SOLUTION, OR PART OF THE PROBLEM?

I first saw the tweet below this past Sunday afternoon.  It was shared by a friend of mine to his social feed, regarding the clean up after the unrest following the death of George Floyd. It struck me as interesting because it’s such a paradox. The photos and first sentence are about unity. The second sentence is about division. To be fair, I don’t know if that was intentional, or just a flippant comment. What I do know is it’s stated with such confidence... and it’s also completely inaccurate. The reason I know that, is just a few hours earlier I had watched the morning news circuit on TV and had literally seen this exact story on multiple stations, both local and national.

But here’s the scary part.  Look at the numbers below the photos. 607,000 people ‘liked’ it. 212,000 people retweeted it.  All it took was one click, from a device they held right there in their hands with the power to confirm whether it was true. They chose not to.

If you do a five second Google search of “Minneapolis Volunteers Clean up” it will reveal page after page of ‘mainstream media’ outlets that covered this. All the Minneapolis local stations had it. Broadcast network news covered it.  Forbes and the Chicago Tribune did the story.  Even the oft vilified Fox News and their viewpoint rival CNN covered this unified effort of clean up. The screen shot below is just page one of the Google video carousel for the search:

I would have posted a screenshot of the links to articles, but there are so many it would take too long to scroll past.

The New York Times posted this article last night with the headline “Global Leaders Urge U.S. to Protect Reporters Amid Floyd Protests”.  Here's an excerpt:

Experts say the recent attacks reflect a growing pattern of anti-press violence in the United States. Pauline Adès-Mével, a spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders, said the frequency and the intensity of the U.S. attacks are “shocking.”

We’ve seen American journalists under siege covering this story, but now allies like Germany and Australia say their reporters have been physically assaulted here in the U.S., and they are calling for us to do better. 

“It’s a democracy, and it’s also a symbol,” she said of the United States, adding that it is “no longer a champion of press freedom, either at home or abroad.”

The incidents mentioned by Reporters Without Borders in the Times article center on encounters with the police, but social media channels are filled with posts that fan the flames. They take shots at traditional media for only showing the ugly side and none of the unifying parts of this protest story, but the facts show otherwise if people simply choose to look for them.

There's no question there is a lot of bad news and many of the images are hard to look at right now. We're living in a historic moment. And the news media is far from perfect covering it, but that's why the criticism needs to be saved for when it's warranted. Otherwise, it's just divisive rhetoric. This tweet, whether intentional or not, was the latter... multiplied 212,000 times. All it does is stir people into a frenzy of anger and mistrust.

The irony is we’re all “the media” now by definition. We all have a megaphone.  Based on the tweeter’s followers, I’m not sure she fits the usual description of an “influencer”, but clearly this tweet demonstrates we all have influence.  How will you use yours today?