Earlier this evening, we posted a factually inaccurate tweet on our Twitter account:
“Survey says 100% of @UOfsl affiliated women have been sexually assaulted, ASUO members threaten to halt expansion.”
This was a misrepresentation of an accurate story, which reported that according to the “results of the latest campus Climate Survey, conducted by University of Oregon psychology professor Jennifer J. Freyd,” 100 percent of “Fraternity and Sorority Life-affiliated female students who reported non-consensual sexual contact” on the survey “were violated by male perpetrators.”
As a result of the tweet, we received dozens of requests to take the article down. Our social media editor followed Emerald protocol, and, after tweeting the correction, kept the original tweet to preserve transparency. After speaking with the Emerald’s management staff and newsroom advisor, however, I decided to break the newsroom’s social media policy and remove the tweet.
Thank you to our audience on Twitter for bringing this error to our attention, and our apologies to those who were misled or misrepresented by our tweet. We plan to use this incident to refine our social media standards and training.
As someone who has reported extensively on the issue of sexual assault at the UO, it saddens me to write this letter. We are a newsroom that serves the University of Oregon community, and spreading misinformation does a disservice to our audience, our staff and the person responsible for the tweet — a woman in the FSL community.
Going forward, we will continue to devote our energy to bringing the community accurate and trustworthy information.
Sincerely,
Dahlia Bazzaz
2015-2016 Editor in Chief