About

Hello! Thank you for taking the time to check out Digital Citizens, my totally legit news and opinion blog that is definitely not an undergraduate research project in a news website trench coat! Just kidding–it is an undergraduate research project in a trench coat. This website was created to present my research with the Mellon Research Fellows at the Virginia Community College System and Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

I have always had a passion for journalism. As a young child, one of my favorite games was to pretend to be a TV newscaster reporting on comically disastrous fictional world events–since then, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to shake that journalistic spark (or that sense of humor, for that matter). As I grew older, and short-form video platforms like TikTok grew in popularity, I started to recognize that the world of journalism was changing–especially for my peers, who I saw taking in the news on TikTok with just as much trust (if not more, at times) as they would have in traditional news outlets. This level of trust placed in strangers on social media began to disturb me, especially as I began to recognize how this trust enabled the spread of misinformation that had a direct impact on my life, and the lives of my friends and family. I often found myself wondering how to make a change in the level of thought that the people around me put into the content they saw on social media.

 

I still don’t know if I have an answer. With this project, I hope to take a closer look at how citizen journalists operate on platforms like TikTok, and to illuminate ways we can learn to interact with news content on social media more responsibly–because as long as everyone has a camera in their pocket and an internet connection, anyone can be a journalist.​