It used to be a big debate: Who owns a reporter’s social media account — the reporter or their employer?
Okay, so it’s not much of a debate anymore. When David Fahrenthold moved from The Washington Post to The New York Times, there wasn’t really much question that his Twitter followers would follow him. These days, reporters almost always arrive at a job with a social media presence already in place, and while posting there may be part of their job, their handle is theirs. Still, it wasn’t that long ago that ownership of social media accounts was the sort of thing that fueled lawsuits.
But the industry-wide shift from Twitter to Bluesky has opened up a small new front in the IP wars. You see, “verification” on Bluesky means something different than it did on the old bird site.
