Bloomberg EIC to staff: Be careful using Twitter as a source

Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait sent out the following to the staff on Tuesday:

Recent changes at Twitter have heightened the risks for using the platform as a source of news. We need to remain vigilant in assessing misinformation and hoaxes.

If you see potentially newsworthy content on Twitter, before you send a headline or write up a story, please take a moment to think about whether this is a reliable source and whether the information is plausible. In some cases, you may need to talk to a few people to verify the account and the content before proceeding. If there is any doubt at all, don’t publish anything; confirm the information with a real person whose contact information you didn’t get from an account you can’t verify and whose identity you know is real. Flag suspicious content to your managers, the News Desk and any other teams that may encounter these tweets. And as a reminder about the dangers of hoaxes in general, you can take a fresh look at our training video in BU, “Hoaxes, Hacks and Disinformation.”

Also, at this point, we’re not allowing the cost of setting up a personal account on Twitter Blue to be expensed.