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Until recently, our news came with labels. A newspaper byline or network logo conveyed, however imperfectly, something about how the information had been produced: editors, sourcing standards, corrections practices, and a reputation that could suffer when those standards failed.
The erosion started before social media. Cable news blurred the line between reporting and punditry. Search drove publishers to write for the click. Algorithms rewarded the provocative over the considered. Social media took those lessons and opened the franchise to everyone. The studio, printing press, and distribution network moved into our pockets. The standards did not.
The result is a strange kind of information equality. Reporting, expertise, opinion, advertising, and utter nonsense get the same real estate on your phone. The feed flattens it all into content, and leaves us to sort out the rest.
That feed does offer one credential: perceived popularity. It can tell us that a person promising to unlock the secret to gut health has 2 million followers. It does not tell us whether that advice comes from a lifetime of expertise or a morning on ChatGPT. It’s a remarkably efficient system for measuring influence, with no way to assess the practices behind it.
A recent New York Times article reported on creators taking money from political campaigns and PACs to promote candidates, without disclosing it. That wasn’t news to me. As an independent news creator, I’m aware of the political and PAC money in this space. What caught my attention was the proposed fix: government regulation.
Disclosing who paid you to say something should not require intervention from Washington D.C. Journalism didn’t need a law to require corroboration or a corrections policy. Traditional newsrooms imposed standards and practices on themselves for a reason: standards built credibility, and practiced daily, allowed newsrooms to earn the public’s trust.
Before I became an independent journalist, I worked at ABC, MSNBC, and CNN, as well as in local news. All of those newsrooms had rules about anonymous sources, attribution, conflicts of interest, advertising, and corrections. In television news, we called them standards and practices, a somewhat grand name for the basic rules of doing the job. They told us what was expected and gave the public something to hold us to.
When I started News Not Noise in 2018, relatively few journalists were building news operations directly on social media. I’ve watched what was then an experiment become an information industry. Now the standards need to catch up.
It’s time for leading independent journalists and evidence-based creators to come together and create a Creator Constitution, a voluntary set of principles for how we work: Credit sources. Correct errors. Disclose financial relationships that could influence what you say. The goal is not to police which views are acceptable. It’s to make the practices of those who share them visible.
Creators who sign on could use a recognizable mark on their profiles. When I first proposed this in an Atlantic article last year, I suggested a “voluntary opt-in LEED-type certification that awards something like a blue check mark — but vetted far more rigorously” for creators who credit their sources, check their facts, and reveal when their content is sponsored.
For audiences, this would provide something platforms currently don’t: a signal that the stranger in their feed agreed to some basic rules. The question I get most often from my Instagram audience is, “Is this true?” — usually with a screenshot attached. Shared standards would give them a way to start answering that for themselves, and a clearer sense of what they should expect from anyone asking for their trust.
For creators, it could make rigor visible. Reporting has an unfortunate production problem: getting things right takes time. The algorithm has yet to introduce a bonus for calling a second source. AI has made the economics more perverse: it can produce a social post that looks like real reporting in seconds. Audiences have no consistent and reliable way of knowing whether a post was reported, generated, hallucinated, or some combination of the three. Shared standards would give creators who invest time and effort to check their facts a way to show it. This would help seed a new information economy, one that makes trust valuable and rewards those who earn it.
Shared standards would also help creators who care about accuracy find one another. On Instagram, I’m constantly asked to make sense of everything from the impact of wildfire smoke to whatever AI can supposedly do now. Knowing everything isn’t my job. Knowing who to trust is. Advertisers might appreciate the distinction, too. Standards could help them distinguish viral creators with a big audience from credible partners.
This raises hard questions. How do we agree on standards? What should independent voices be required to disclose, from financial relationships to their use of AI? Who should hold creators to their promises: other creators, an independent committee, audiences? Could we train AI to help us hold ourselves accountable? And can standards be rigorous without recreating the gatekeeping the new media world disrupted?
Trusted voices don’t need to agree on what to think.
But we should be able to agree on what we owe the people who trust us enough to listen.
The gatekeepers are gone. The obligations that come with informing people are not. What’s missing is a Creator Constitution to earn the public’s trust. It’s time we write one.
This year, as a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, I’ll help bring together independent journalists, evidence-based creators and experts to help write a Creator Constitution. If you’re an evidence-based creator, an independent journalist, an expert in standards and practices, or a technologist and would like to contribute, please email me at community@newsnotnoise.com with the subject line: “Constitution.”
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