Ambient Distrust and Toxicity against Legacy Media on Twitter

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Marloes Geboer, whose focus is on ambient misogyny, distrust, and anti-press sentiment on Twitter. She is interested especially in the British ‘partygate’ scandal, which illustrates journalists’ growing entanglement with societal issues and topics on social media. Some 1500 #partygate tweets also targetted the BBC political journalist Laura Kuensberg, who was rumoured to have been present at the illegal parties held at 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

A definitive answer to this question is beside the point: the more important issue here is that this question was repeated frequently throughout the online discussion, and potentially reflects a supercharged, overly critical public turning on a journalist. This can be understood as part of an interaction ritual where Twitter users must signal their criticality with ever more aggressive questioning.

This is embedded in a broader trend towards extreme criticism of legacy media that also promotes an ambient distrust and toxicity towards media outlets and their journalists. This is not organised or intentional but is expressed and perpetuated in everyday online engagement, and can ultimately amplify explicit hate. Journalists who must be on social media cannot easily escape this, and the few platform affordances that are available to them to protect themselves from being tagged or messaged are not sufficient for evading this targetting.