In the early hours of July 14, just hours after an attempted assassination of former United States president Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, the X account Libs of TikTok posted, “Hi @ubc, this one of your professors?” It included two screenshots: one was of the University of British Columbia faculty of medicine web page with information about a faculty member named Karen Pinder; the second was of a post by Pinder from earlier that evening: “Damn, so close. Too bad.” The screenshot included Pinder’s follow-up: “What a glorious day this could have been!” The Libs of TikTok post swiftly racked up nearly 200,000 likes and 38,000 reposts.
Libs of TikTok is run by Chaya Raichik, a social media influencer with more than 3 million followers on X, who frequently targets individuals or organizations associated with queer or trans rights by directing right-wing outrage like a firehose in their direction. After Raichik posted about the American gym franchise Planet Fitness, which has trans-inclusive facilities as a company policy, at least fifty-four bomb threats were made against their locations, according to the Washington Post. In a February investigation, NBC News identified more than thirty-three threats of violence—made against schools, children’s hospitals, libraries, elected officials, and businesses—since November 2020 that followed posts by Raichik.
Pinder’s posts about the attempted assassination were egregious, no matter your politics. In almost any field or industry, it would likely result in termination, though as a tenured faculty member, Pinder has an exceptional degree of professional protection. Still, her posts demonstrated poor judgment, and a swift response from her employer would have been appropriate. But by the time UBC became aware of Pinder’s post, it had already spread far and wide. Within hours, UBC’s X account was inundated with angry comments; a pinned post on its page, about an astronomical discovery, quickly accumulated more than 4,000 replies about Pinder.
Later that day, as realization dawned about how close the US had come to the first assassination of a president or former president since John F. Kennedy’s in 1963, the Canadian Press published a story about Pinder’s post. It was republished widely by outlets including the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and the Times Colonist. Global News ran interviews with a motley panel of citizens that included John Rustad, leader of the BC Conservative Party, and a random resident of Chilliwack. UBC confirmed to the Canadian Press that they were looking into Pinder’s post. Neither the Canadian Press story nor separate stories published by other outlets, including CTV News and American outlet MSN, identified that the post had come to public attention via the Libs of TikTok account.
The attempted assassination of Trump is, without question, the biggest news story of the moment. It is understandable that Canadian outlets would be looking for a hook, and they found one in Pinder’s opprobrium-sparking post. But when media outlets are following the lead of a social media influencer with a track record of provoking violence, it’s worth questioning what exactly we’re doing here.
It is a dire time for Canadian media: only 37 percent of English-speaking Canadians trust the news, a decline of twenty percentage points since 2018, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute. News outlets are hemorrhaging jobs; the latest blow came from Corus Entertainment, which operates radio stations and TV news networks across the country, with its announcement that it would be cutting around 800 jobs by August. Everywhere, reporters are trying to do more with less, under tremendous pressure and amid mounting resentment and hostility from a growing segment of the population. As media outlets grapple with these complex intersecting challenges, they are also racing to be the first to publish stories that will reach as many people as possible; striving for virality is a survival tactic, particularly when you rely on digital advertising revenue.
As the industry decays, social media has become a go-to place for tips and quotes. In the wake of the Toronto Star’s deeply and thoughtfully reported coverage of the late author Alice Munro’s complicity in silencing the sexual abuse of her youngest child, Andrea Robin Skinner, a number of outlets picked up the story and, in lieu of adding original reporting, quoted from X posts by members of the literary community expressing their reaction to the Star’s reporting.
Under these industry-wide constraints, it’s understandable that many media outlets are resorting to sourcing their stories from social media posts. For one thing, social media is beating them to the punch. Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz points out that many people learned that US president Joe Biden had withdrawn from his second-term campaign from meme accounts on X, which posted the news before outlets like the New York Times. Lorenz writes that “the number of people becoming informed about the world through disparate networks of online accounts and creators is growing.”
But using social media as a primary source has serious flaws. In June, rumours that renowned linguist Noam Chomsky had died circulated widely on X, originating from a since-deleted tweet by a user named Gina van Raphael. Her post spread so rapidly across social media that its visibility overshadowed the fact that the post was not confirmed—nor was there any clear association between Chomsky and van Raphael, whose bio on X describes her as a political anthropologist, though a search of her name turns up no university affiliations or scholarly publications. Despite this lack of verification, outlets like Jacobin and The New Statesman swiftly published obituaries before Chomsky’s wife confirmed to the Associated Press that her husband was, in fact, still alive.
In a case like Pinder’s, there are additional considerations beyond the possibility of printing a hasty retraction. In recent years, the power of social media mobs to identify and target individuals who are caught in a transgression has reached a tremendous and terrifying scale—whether that transgression is minor, like making a face in the background of someone’s TikTok video or flirting while wearing a wedding ring, or misconduct worthy of professional consequences, such as wishing a foreign former leader had been successfully assassinated. The result is thousands of people calling for a head on a spike—or escalating to genuine intimidation; a University of Guelph professor whose post on X was also seen as endorsing the attempted assassination has since received violent threats, according to the Guelph police department.
There is a maxim often referenced online: “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” Countless people have lost an opportunity or a job as a result of a social media post or their online conduct—which seems like a stupid prize commensurate with the stupid game of posting at all. But receiving harassment and death threats from thousands of strangers seems like disproportionate punishment for almost any social offence, though it is often the inevitable and predictable result.
There is an argument to be made that the role of daily news media is to report on stories that the public is interested in, and the fact that thousands of users are condemning someone on social media could certainly be considered a topic of interest. The incentives are clear: playing to outrage is an effective tool for driving traffic, even when the news value is negligible. But this passive justification ignores the fact that reporters—who often face online harassment themselves, particularly if they are women or people of colour—know perfectly well what happens to the subjects of public shaming. When media outlets partake in the stupid games that play out on social media every day, the prize might be losing what credibility and integrity they have left.
I think you’ll agree this story was powerful.
Senior Editor, The Walrus
