Imagine this: Your television station runs a thirty-second promo teasing the stories ahead in the next newscast. Standard stuff, you’re probably thinking. But in this imaginary scenario, the promo is immediately followed by thirty seconds of airtime with anyone saying anything they wish about what was in the promo, with no filter or editing of any sort. In other words, every promo on your station would be followed by thirty seconds of “vox populi.” Seem a bit crazy to you?

That’s why we find it harder to justify why a local television station should be on social media these days. Read any post from a TV station’s newsroom–and then read the comments that follow. Spoiler alert: it is usually not an exercise for the easily offended.

There is no better example of how divisive speech in this country is right now than on social media. And while you will find no bigger supporters of free speech than us, we’ll remind you that social media is anything but free speech. It is speech “moderated” by computer algorithms specifically designed to hold your attention by feeding you contrarian content to enrage you or similar content to affirm your opinions, whatever they may be.

It’s called “optimizing engagement,” and the major social platforms have been chasing it ever since Mark Zuckerberg discovered that coding a webpage that allowed college students to vote on whose pictures were “Hot or Not” created a firestorm of traffic to his nascent website then known as “The Facebook.”

We’ve heard several broadcast journalists argue that they “have to be” on social, especially X/Twitter because that is where newsmakers post first. And that is true to some degree. We’ve seen the platform become the mechanism for everyone, from politicians to local law enforcement to send out messages before using any other way to communicate. Writing, editing, and sending out a press release takes some time. But it takes seconds to tap out a couple of sentences and hit the send button.

Lest there be any confusion, we are not suggesting that local television stations give up their online presence. A robust website and mobile app are critical distribution platforms for every news outlet. But rather than having a dashboard on a screen in the newsroom tracking who has posted the most on social media in the past 24 minutes or hours, why not channel all of that energy into first posting content on the platforms the station controls? It is probably worth also considering that those same station platforms might be making a dollar or two that will likely help pay your salary.

While we are on this point, we need to address the issue of local television journalists who believe they are also influencers on social media. If you want to be respected and taken seriously when you are on the air, please don’t post content like dance videos from the studio or get ready with me reels. And a post that pushes a product or service is just a commercial. We don’t know of any station that has news anchors doing commercials, so why would it be acceptable for you to do that on social? That also goes for putting a business on “blast” because you didn’t get the service you believe you deserved. If you wouldn’t go on the air and say, “XYZ business is bad to its customers,” then you shouldn’t say it on your publicly available social media.

The RTDNA held an online seminar today on “Protect Yourself: Online Harassment and Mitigation Response.” The mere fact that this session was necessary should give every working journalist pause about how much they want to be publicly available on social media platforms. If you want to be on social media to share with friends and family, you should seriously consider making your profile and content private and only available to those you know and trust. And you should consider having anything you might post professionally go on the station’s branded social media rather than one in your name.

We would urge every newsroom to seriously discuss how they want to be represented on each social media platform going forward. We’re unaware of any verified data suggesting that being on social media equals more viewers or a station growing its business in any meaningful way.

However, we believe that using social platforms without a very specific plan and discipline to that plan can hurt the credibility of both a station and, perhaps more importantly, the individuals who work for it.

A reminder: We also now have a newsletter targeted to broadcast journalists with practical advice on working in the field. It is called tvnews.coach and you can see it by clicking here.