Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) The question I get asked as often as any other is, "Who's doing good work on Twitter in the Trump era?" In the thread below, 230 people nominate 135 Twitter feeds—the best list of this sort I've ever seen. Read on for a few additional thoughts on this sort of accounting.

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1056989128015802368

2/ First, thanks to David Roberts (@voxdotcom) for prompting the list. The question David asked was, "[Who deserves a] Pulitzer Prize for defending facts, on Twitter, in the age of Trump[?] Note: this is *not* just 'good follows.' I mean specifically 'bringing documented facts.'"

3/ The second thing I want to note: I'm familiar with very few of the 135 feeds nominated—and that's a very good thing. Journalists looking to do some "both sidesism" for right-wing cranks often falsely claim that the progressive Twittersphere is (a) insular, and (b) incestuous.

4/ Even if we *only* look at the feeds nominated more than once across the 230 nominating tweets, we still find 50 individual feeds, which again is quite a large number given that (if my own experience is any indication at all) many of these feeds are unfamiliar with many others.

5/ One indication the 230 nominators were reading very different feeds is that only *three feeds*—of the 135 nominated—were nominated more than six times (i.e. as of the count I did *before* tweeting out a link to the poll; I didn't want my tweeting the link to skew the results).

6/ The total number of "votes" was nearly 400. And do you know how many Louise Mensch got? (Remember, we've been told, including by major media, that Louise Mensch is the darling of the progressive Twittersphere in the Trump era.)

One vote. She got *one* vote. Think about that.

7/ Mensch's entire "team" of connected single-author Twitter feeds—they call themselves [#]TeamPatriot, as I understand it—received *under 10 votes*. Out of nearly 400 votes cast. And nearly all of those votes came from a single nominator. I wish major media would mark this fact.

8/ Of the dozen most-voted-for feeds, 10 are run by individuals who tweet under a handle that discloses their name, while the other two are run by individuals whose names are widely known to their readers (i.e., their names aren't a secret). This fact too has long been distorted.

9/ Here are the authors of the dozen most-voted-for Trump-fact-checking Twitter feeds (alphabetical by first name):

Aaron Rupar
Caroline Orr
Daniel Dale
David Fahrenthold
Jamelle Bouie
Kevin Kruse
Sarah Kendzior
Leah McElrath
Marcy Wheeler
Seth Abramson
Teri Kanefield
Walt Shaub

10/ Nearly all these folks are writing in an area of expertise, e.g. Fahrenthold (financial records), Kendzior (authoritarianism), Shaub (ethics), Abramson (law), and Dale (Trump's misstatements of fact). All 12 are known to correct themselves if they make a mistake—which is key.

11/ The hundreds of nominators also showed a predilection for mainstream corporate media sources as well as independent digital journalists—among the more-than-once nominated feeds were many journalists from major media organizations. Progressives *haven't* abandoned major media.

12/ The upshot: progressives on social media searching for fact-checking of Trump on a variety of subjects are asking for and finding non-anonymous subject-area experts—many of whom are in or connected to major media—who follow key journalistic guidelines. That's great news! /end

PS/ Yes, I know I somehow messed up an alphabetical list! No dramatic irony here, folks. 😎