2020 took the election day from me, but it gave me Electionland. And it was amazing.
2020 has been a humbling year for me. For you too? I couldn’t be surprised. But I must confess I was pretty surprised when I felt so sad about missing the election day. If only we knew…
This year I was supposed to be in New York beginning my M.A. in Social Journalism and cover the U.S. elections. I wanted to understand all the complexity of it; the electoral college, the swing states, the early ballots. I felt really sad about missing a historical moment, but that went fast thanks to the amazing Carrie Brown who managed to get our class in ProPublica’s Electionland 2020 with the First Draft’s Student Network. Now, if you don't know what that is you have to click here. Now. Because it is an amazing project and I hope every student would have the opportunity to learn from it.
Its mission is to monitor social media platforms for misinformation and real-time concerns related to mail-in voting, early voting and voter intimidation. We learned to use boolean searches to look for specific information, to do some advanced research, we used Tweetdeck, CrowdTangle, Junkipedia, Google Alerts like a pro. I chose the Latino community in Chicago, Illinois to look for mail-in voting and voter intimidation in Spanish. Because I am now obsessed with TikTok I also looked for misinformation there and found examples like this, this and this.
The spread of fake news, misinformation and/or alternative facts are a real deal. You can only see how big the problem is when you start looking for it and it is scary. I’m not sure if journalism is going to stop this from growing but it is surely helping people to understand a little bit more how to trust information.
Working with First Draft and the Student Network made me feel useful in a week where I felt so out of control. I learned, shared, discovered and really enjoyed working with the team. And most important of how important journalism is for democracy.
