Public PLN, Media Literacy & Public Discourse
Going into this week I figured “media literacy” would be one of those topics that’s mostly common sense dressed up in academic language, the kind of thing you already sort of know. The house hippo video changed my mind pretty fast. It’s a completely fake creature built out of puppets and clever camera work, and I was fully convinced it was CGI the whole way through. That was a good reminder not to be overconfident about how easily I can spot something fake.
What really got me thinking was Sophie Lui, the Global BC anchor interviewed for this week’s material, and how deliberately she splits her platforms. Instagram is where her actual life shows up, her partner, her day to day, the stuff you’d expect from a personal account. Twitter is a completely different world for her, it’s where her brain lives, the writers she follows, the articles that catch her attention, basically the version of her that exists outside of reading the six o’clock news. She said you’d know what she’s having for dinner from Instagram, but you’d know what makes her tick from Twitter, and I honestly love that as a way of describing platform-specific identity. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously split my own accounts by purpose like that, mine are more just “things I use” versus “things I don’t,” so this gave me something new to actually think about.
The benefit of having a real PLN, according to Lui anyway, isn’t the visibility, it’s that it keeps her learning. She talked about stumbling onto journalists and writers through Twitter who then led her to other writers, this whole chain reaction of discovery that she compared to how networking used to work in her early career, cold calling newsrooms, mailing physical demo reels, literally driving to a city to shake someone’s hand. A PLN is just a faster, more energizing version of that same hustle, and honestly it made me appreciate how much easier we have it now. Meanwhile her accounts are verified specifically because Global BC backs them, which gives her real credibility she wouldn’t have on a personal account, but also means she’s stopped herself mid-tweet more than once, since everything she posts reflects on the network too, not just her.
Building a PLN you can actually rely on comes back to the three questions the house hippo video walks through, where did this actually come from, is that original source reliable, and has someone already debunked it. Which is such a simple framework, but the video’s whole point is that Googling the fake house hippo just leads you straight to sites confidently insisting it’s real. Practical tools like reverse image search, checking whether an outlet has an actual track record, National Geographic being trustworthy partly because it’s been around since 1888, and literally just adding the word “hoax” to a search, are genuinely useful habits I want to actually start using, not just nod along to.
That instinct to slow down seems to be the real skill that separates a veteran storyteller from everyone else scrolling next to them. Lui said her tweeting has genuinely slowed down over the last while because she doesn’t always want to deal with the reaction, and she’s composed plenty of tweets she never sent. Hirst’s chapter on the political economy of fake news explains why that pause matters so much, misinformation spreads because speed and engagement get rewarded over accuracy, so anyone who deliberately refuses to play that game is doing something genuinely admirable, working against the whole incentive structure on purpose.
Trilling and Fadel’s definition of media literacy, borrowed from the Center for Media Literacy, is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media, understand what role it plays in society, and think critically instead of just absorbing whatever shows up in your feed. That feels important for exactly the reason the house hippo video demonstrates, something completely fake can look totally convincing once it’s on video, and the first Google result might just confirm the lie rather than debunk it. Building the actual habit of tracing something back to its source feels like one of the more genuinely useful skills I could walk away from this course with.
I think media literacy gets dismissed mostly because it’s inconvenient, not because people don’t believe in it. Lui mentioned literally getting asked by an account she follows every single day whether she’s doom scrolling, and her answer is usually yes. Scrolling is passive, tracing a source back to where it actually came from takes effort, and there’s also this assumption that spotting fake content is obvious, which the house hippo video very thoroughly disproves. I’d like to think I’d have caught it, but I didn’t, so there’s some humility built into this whole exercise.
The reason you want varied views but factual consensus in a PLN is that those are two different things people accidentally conflate. Different perspectives are good, an echo chamber that only ever agrees with itself isn’t really a network, it’s just a mirror. But varied perspectives still need to be standing on the same set of facts, otherwise you’re not disagreeing about interpretation anymore, you’re disagreeing about reality itself. Lui mentioned following some accounts early on purely out of obligation, feeling like she should stay aware of a wide range of opinions, and eventually admitted that wore her down and she stopped. That felt like a genuinely healthy boundary to set, staying open minded without forcing yourself to consume everything.
If I were curating my own accounts for a public, critical audience instead of the mostly private, low stakes situation I’m actually in, I’d want that same intentional split Lui described, being deliberate about what’s personal and what’s professional instead of letting it all blur together. It’s not something I have to solve right now, but it’s good to already have a framework for it whenever that changes.
The risk and reward of engaging with a public audience comes down to speed. The reach and credibility are real, that’s exactly what Lui got out of Twitter despite everything else. But the risks scale just as fast, she talked about getting hate mail and hostile phone calls even before social media existed, which honestly floored me, someone mailed her a comb once, no note, just judging her haircut via postal service. Social media didn’t invent that hostility, it just gave it a much faster delivery method and a much bigger audience.
Being a public figure in a position of trust, whether that’s a journalist, an educator, a lawyer, whoever, comes with a different set of consequences than a regular account has. Lui brought up a colleague who got a harassing comment during a live TV hit, and how fast other reporters rallied around her publicly once it happened. That kind of visible support wouldn’t have existed before social media, those moments used to just stay inside the newsroom. It’s actually a nice reminder that public platforms can build real solidarity, even while the same visibility raises the stakes for everyone involved.
Her approach to negative replies was mute, not block, because blocking apparently gives people the satisfaction of knowing they got to you, and mostly just take a breath before responding at all. She said the occasional critique does genuinely make her rethink how she covers something, so it’s not that she tunes everything out, it’s that she’s gotten really good at sorting the signal from the noise.
Conflict over media literacy and facts happens because correcting someone’s misinformation rarely feels like a factual correction to them, it feels personal, like you’re attacking who they are instead of just what they believe. Lui’s stories about hate mail over something as trivial as a haircut make that pretty clear, a lot of public backlash has nothing to do with facts at all, it’s people reacting to discomfort and calling it disagreement.
The actual payoff of a PLN that values media literacy is that it compounds, and honestly that’s the part I’m most excited about. Lui’s Twitter network keeps leading her to more credible writers and journalists, which lead to more, which is exactly the kind of snowball effect a genuinely reliable network gives you that a purely engagement-chasing feed never will.
References
Trilling, B., & Fadel, C. (2009). 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. Jossey-Bass.
Hirst, M. (2018). Navigating social journalism: A handbook for media literacy and citizen journalism. Routledge.
MediaSmarts. (n.d.). Break the fake: House hippo [Video]. https://mediasmarts.ca