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Medium Lets You Write Almost Anything — and That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing
How to be a responsible member of the Medium community
Medium is a fantastic platform for writers and readers to connect with each other. Whether you’re interested in poetry, personal essays, or space exploration, Medium can help you connect to a community of like-minded people. For the most part, it’s a reasonably sane corner of the internet.
While Medium is all of these things, there’s one thing it is not: a source for truthful, honest reporting. To be fair, there are publications on here that employ fact-checkers and editors to vet their stories (like Politifact and The Economist, both of which have stopped publishing on Medium), but there are also plenty that don’t. Medium gives you the freedom to publish almost anything you want — including things that aren’t true. So before you use Medium as a source of information, here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself.
Is Medium a social media platform?
The short answer is yes. Medium co-mingles opinion pieces and journalism in a way that can blur the line between the two. The danger is that just because something looks like a legitimate article, doesn’t mean that it’s been written to journalistic standards. Welcome…
