At 7am every Sunday morning, my dad gets up to go buy his weekly newspaper. Whatever stories get published throughout the week, he reads on his iPad or hears on the radio. For most of his 64 years, he has relied solely on physical newspapers to keep him in the loop on what is happening in the world.
Once common practice, this is now an activity enjoyed by few. According to the UN, almost half the world’s population uses social media – whether that be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. What were designed as forums for maintaining social connections and forming relationships, these platforms are being used increasingly as primary news sources for many around the world. For example, the proportion of people in the United States – a country plagued with misinformation and disinformation – who name social media as their main news outlet has risen from 4% in 2015 to 34% in 2025. Globally, 17% of people use TikTok to keep up to date with the news.
The more popular social media becomes as a provider of news, the greater threat confirmation bias poses to society. While the algorithms created by social media platforms enable us to consume information unique to our interests and beliefs, they create a perception of reality that causes us to put our critical thinking skills to rest. Even when an article or video makes its way into our feed which contradicts the rest of the information we’re fed, the confirmation bias produced by algorithms leads us to interpret this alternative perspective in a way that still supports our views.
With the news increasingly being consumed via social media platforms, and the increasing intelligence of algorithms, it is important for humans as a collective to remain critical of what is presented to them on these platforms. Confirmation bias traps us in an echo chamber of our own beliefs and as a result, these beliefs remain unchallenged and our biases are cemented. We are seeing the result of this across America, where the inability to think critically of the information spread across social media platforms is amplifying dangerous rhetoric and creating collective delusion. It is in this sense that ease of access is hindering quality. People are no longer thinking critically about what is presented to them. The effort to cross-check and reflect on the information we are consuming is outweighed by the benefit of having everything so easily at our fingertips. We are no longer digging underneath what first appears on our screens and asking: Who wrote this article? Who made this video? What is their intention? How is this affirming a belief I held already? Or challenging one?
While I tease my dad that his Sunday newspaper routine is old-fashioned and out-dated, I appreciate that his news consumption is at least somewhat protected from the dangers of confirmation bias. The paper generates no algorithm, and those reading are unable to be selective. For our generation, this may sound annoying. But the inability to personally curate the media we consume may be a solution we have lost sight of.
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