Research With Non-Scholarly Internet Resources

It's on you, as the student, to always confirm that these people are truly worth listening to in the scholastic and academic sense. Please be careful, and when it down, ask your professor or a librarian. Some things to remember:

1. Don’t quote someone because you like what they say. Quote them because their tweets have relevance to your assignment.
2. If the creator or author is relevant to your assignment (rather than the hashtag or tweet), confirm that they have legitimacy in the field.
3. If quoting an expert, celebrity, etc., confirm that their Twitter handle is actually linked to them and that they either create the tweets themselves or take responsibility for them.

This should not shock you, but just because it came up in your feed, that doesn’t make it acceptable for school or your professor. Social media tends to reflect you, your interests, your friends, and your market demographics for advertisers (like you age, sexual orientation, where you live, etc.), not your academic life. Most of the videos and articles that flow through your social media don’t have references. With that in mind, be careful.

If you find an article, video, quote, or other material you’d like to use, be sure to evaluate it’s sources on their own merit. Some question you should ask yourself:

• Who posted this, and who produced it?
• Did I find this through an influencer? If so, do I have any reason to assume they're an expert other than them confidently telling me so?
• Did this originally come from a newspaper? A journal? A magazine?
• If it’s from a web page, who owns or operates it?
• If it’s an opinion piece, who wrote it? Is the person who wrote it a recognized expert? Have they written other things? \
• Is there corporate information? Contact information?
• How easy would be to write a Works Cited or Reference page for this?

Referencing Twitter isn’t entirely different from referencing YouTube or Instagram. Twitter used to be lauded for its good uses (aiding communication for people under totalitarian regimes; helping people get assistance during terrorist attacks; even helping authors promote books) and maligned for its negative uses (lack of depth; stalking and harassing, especially of female celebrities). However, in it's current state, Twitter has become extremely unreliable.

If you have occasion to quote or references a tweet or series of tweets in your essay, please keep in mind that they should be treated like any other electronic source and thoroughly vetted.

Though many people go directly to TikTok or YouTube for information on all kinds of things, they're not always the best sources of information. Many influencers are bad actors, promoting themselves and producing content for likes and followers rather than to put out reliable information. Others have the best of intentions but aren't experts in their field, and are getting their information from illegitimate sources. But there are also lots of great sources! Just be very thoughtful and very careful when using these social media sites for references.