![]() "For a while I tried 'RTs are reportage favorites are bookmarks,' but eventually gave up trying to explain (Favorites are a whole other problem)," he writes.Īs Twitter matured, its users' skins have thickened (yesterday's very NSFW US Airways tweet disaster spawned more than a few laughs, but little in the way of outrage or navel-gazing about the platform) and the service as a whole seems to have adopted an unofficial method for coping with the spread of misinformation (basically, freak out about it less). "I started to dislike it around the same time," he says. Nor did it mean I was confirming what another news organization was reporting." There was no broader motive or desire to change industry standards.Īround late 2008, Twitter began to take off among journalists - and other journalists, like then- Times employee Brian Stelter, began to borrow the phrase.Īround the time other journalists had cribbed the language, LaForge realized he had created a monster. "As a journalist, I wanted to be clear that a retweet did not necessarily indicate agreement. "A lot of people didn't understand what RT meant back then," he writes. (The Times has often been commended for its rather progressive social media policy, which has few specific guidelines and instead trusts its journalists to exercise the same caution and judgment they would when reporting a story.) He adopted the commonly repeated phrase "links are not endorsements" and casually threw it into his bio as a disclaimer. LaForge says he borrowed the language from the guidance that the Times was giving its newsroom employees to encourage linking out to other sites in their work. "I was an early Twitter adopter, and this phrase was in my bio starting in 2007 or 2008. Patrick LaForge responded in just moments to an email inquiry on the subject. ![]() But unlike the hashtag or manual retweet, its creator remained in the shadows, no doubt surveying his/her creation's damage with adequate horror.Ī search on the Twitter search engine Topsy reveals that one of the earliest mentions of the phrase "retweets are not endorsements" was this one from NBC's Ryan Osborn: Like many of Twitter's quirks, "RTs ≠ endorsements" is the work of one of its users. If you add this disclaimer yourself just because you want to, you are bad at the internet. If your company makes you add this disclaimer, tell the higher-ups they are stupid for doing so. Jesus Christ, do we need to see this ever again in someone's fucking Twitter bio? It's like the "No Smoking" signs on airplanes. A statement of the obvious and - the mark of the "noob."īy 2012's end, the phrase had metastasized across the internet, earning its way onto Gawker's list of Terrible Things That Must End in 2013: What was once a necessity or, at the very least, a comforting "cover your ass" measure, is now a glaring example of archaic tone-deafness. We needed rules - rules that seemed like good ideas at the time.īut as we've come to know, the half-life of a Twitter convention is fleeting. The spread of misinformation was rampant and poorly understood. Early Twitter was a very different place. The disclaimer started out as a necessity, out of an abundance of caution. ![]() Take Twitter's peculiar quirks of language and syntax, such as the popular disclaimer: "Retweets do not equal endorsements." The internet is an unforgiving historian with endless primary sources and a flair for reminding us what we really are online: a barely coordinated mass of bumbling sheep. ![]()
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