The News Is Out: Queer Journalist Enrique Anarte

Over 5 billion people around the world use social media — and each of them spends, on average, about two-and-a-half hours a day texting, watching videos, gossiping, posting cat pictures and getting the latest news. But in an era of A.I. hallucinations and deepfakes, can you really trust what you hear and see online?

 One queer journalist is taking up the challenge of building trust — and an audience — on TikTok and other social media platforms. David Hunt sat down to talk shop with reporter Enrique Anarte, a correspondent at Context, the Thomson Reuters Foundation's journalism platform.

Anarte is an experienced journalist with a master’s in European Union studies and proficiency in five languages. Much of his work for Thomson Reuters involves traditional reporting, which is abundantly sourced and rigorously documented. Less traditional is his presence on social media. Anarte has a large following on TikTok and Instagram, where he posts short, sometimes humorous videos on LGBTQ topics. It’s a new day, he says, and not everyone looks for news and information in traditional formats.

“Social [media] cannot be an afterthought,” he says. “If that happens, you are not serving people with the kind of formats or journalism that they need. We need to understand that social audiences are humans. As Walt Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes.’ When someone opens the newspaper in the morning and then opens TiKTok before bed, they might be seeking the same kind of information, but in slightly different ways.”

Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.