The Associated Press has deleted a tweet posted two weeks ago about the Clinton Foundation, the humanitarian charity set up by Bill and Hillary Clinton with their daughter, Chelsea.
AP, the largest news agency in the US, announced that the tweet “fell short of AP standards by omitting essential context.”
The climbdown has prompted wider action, as AP’s vice president for standards, John Daniszewski, wrote in a blog post:
“We are revising our practices to require removal and correction of any AP tweets found not to meet AP standards, including tweets that contain information that is incorrect, misleading, unclear or could be interpreted as unfair, or having a problem in tone.”
The tweet that provoked a controversy was linked to an investigation by AP into how many Clinton Foundation donors met Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state. It said: “More than half those who met Clinton ... gave money to Clinton Foundation.”
What the tweet did not mention was that AP’s analysis focused only on Clinton’s discretionary meetings with those who were not in the US federal government or representatives of foreign governments.
The omission of the exact nature of AP’s investigation therefore led to both the tweet and the story being criticised by some media critics and politicians. Clinton’s own team were also critical.
AP’s executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, initially defended the report. Although admitting, in an interview with CNN that the tweet was “sloppy” she said the wire service wasn’t going to change it. Now, however, it has been altered to read:
“AP review: many of the discretionary meetings Clinton had at State were with people who gave to Clinton Foundation.”
Clearly, the row has stimulated AP to reconsider its Twitter policy. Previously, AP news executives were left to decide whether deletions or updates of tweets were necessary “on a case-by-case basis.”
But Daniszewski wrote that new guidance – “subjecting tweets to the same internal review and response process as other AP content” – is mandatory.
He wrote. “In the earlier days of Twitter, there had been a belief that removing tweets was akin to retroactively editing a conversation; it wasn’t transparent.
“Additionally, tweets were seen more as providing paths to in-depth content and less as content in themselves that would remain in the public discussion for an extended period.
“Industry thinking on this topic has been changing. And the controversy over the AP tweet has led us to an extensive reflection on this evolution.”
