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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Seems like the right approach to start their own server, instead of making accounts on some of the flagship instances, which only perpetuates the centralisation dogma.
It also does away with some of the really awkward practices news organizations engage in wrt social media. The number of @JournalistNameCBC handles out there is kind of super cringy, and seems to point to journos having company-specific/company-mandated social media accounts, but without any actual company support for them.
Something like this makes having a company-mandated social media account something they're assigned, just like an email address, rather than something they're personally responsible for.
What I'd love to see is news companies spinning up their own instances, for example, a CBC-owned Mastodon instance, with accounts such as
journalistname@cbcnews. It'd work exactly like a company-assigned e-mail address, and would function as such. That each and every post on such an account would be seen as the journalist working under the company, and not their own personal views.And if a journalist wants his own personal account, well, they can either spin up their own instance, or perhaps a union of journalists would spin up an instance, with journalists setting up their accounts that are not tied to any news agency or company.
Am I being too naive and optimistic here? Maybe. But do I want this to happen regardless, yes!
Upon reading the article more closely, this is what the BBC is doing. My bad!
Yep. It's one pattern that I think really sells the federated social media idea.
Hopefully this becomes more normalised. The idea that a company runs their own site, but not social now seems a bit backward.
You love to see it.
Wait, so if I just make an account on twitter named @PeterRothenburgCBC, then everyone thinks I am a legit reporter?
As long as you pay for a blue checkmark, sure.
When I joined Mastodon in the November migration, I wondered why media organisations weren’t spinning up their own servers. Give all the journos an account on that server and there’s your verification right away.
Local isn't a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.
The global stream isn't a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn't going to be as effective as on generalist servers.
But then, search isn't super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.
There's nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.
No of course not everyone or every organisation has the means for that. But those that have should, and others should fan out over different instances: local or regional ones, or thematic ones, instead of congregating on the same three instances because it's 'the main one'.