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“Twitter isn’t real life” is a frequent refrain that proves itself wrong time and time again. Many disabled people have developed robust community as more and more spaces have been made prohibitive to them with loosening COVID restrictions. Sports fans bond over their teams’ successes and failures. Journalists have found sources, friendships, and career opportunities through the website — and had their jobs impacted by what they say online.
Last month Dallas Morning News reporter Meghan Mangrum tweeted at Dallas mayor Eric Johnson, who criticized local media for never covering “good news”: “Bruh, national news is always going to chase the trend. Cultivate relationships with quality local news partnerships.”
Three days later, she was fired — a day after she held a protest against working conditions at the newsroom — and was told it was for violating social media policy, without further elaboration.
Whether or not Mangrum was fired solely for her tweet, or because of her organizing activity, it underscores a phenomenon other reporters have already learned: What gets said online doesn’t always stay there.
Social media policies are shaped by generational expectations of journalism and professionalism, ideas which often chafe against the same expectation from employers to develop relationships with sources and communities by being oneself on social media.
Mangrum’s story also exemplifies the nuances inherent in the growing importance of journalist participation in and engagement with social media, including the way AAVE gets disseminated without credit across TikTok, Twitter, and their companions.
While Mangrum, who is white, used “bruh” in several contexts elsewhere, and the word has been popularized in recent years (take the “Girls who say bruh vs. Girls who say hiii” memes littered across Twitter from 2018 onward), it’s still a word originating in AAVE. And that’s a broader conversation about where the language we use comes from, and who gets to use it. If Mangrum wasn’t able to use “bruh,” what does that mean for Black reporters who speak AAVE?
The litigation over whether “Black Lives Matter” was too “political” a statement to express on social media erased reporters’ identities by trying to draw a dedicated line between the personal and political, and often acted as an attempt to silence or otherwise sideline Black journalists in covering a critical national story. For marginalized people, the personal has always been political.
And while it’s not a requirement to have a social media account to use for journalism, it’s a way to reach parts of one’s community that may not be as accessible in person and to share work on a broader, if not more ephemeral, scale. Many journalists kept Twitter through Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, not without reason.
Employer social media surveillance is counterproductive: if you really want your employees’ full selves at work, that doesn’t mean nitpicking their social media. Especially with the increased expectation that each tweet is part of your work, too.
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