We all know that social media was originally invented for people to stay in touch with a larger group of people. Of course, this is still seen as the main subject of those platforms, but meanwhile we see a lot of other stuff happening on platforms. You quite often encounter advertisements, funny memes, business video’s, motivational quotes, cooking recipes and outfit inspirations. One new thing that’s also contributed to this new range of social media outputs are news accounts.
Even though it isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think about social media, sharing the news on such a platform is very effective when it comes to involving adolescents into present-day news. Statistics show that currently more than 50% of the X (formerly Twitter) users in the United States regularly get news from there. With 353.9 million monthly users globally, this is a huge platform to get to a large group of people all over the globe. But, what are the effects of this? And is this necessarily a good thing?
Small news accounts raising their take on the news
In the US, almost half of the people aged between 18-34 years old use social media for their daily news consumption. This means that social media is proven to be a new way to engage people with media, solving a drastic decline in the other ways of news consumption. But apart from this big positive thing, it brings with it a lot of other problems.
These social media platforms raise convenience for small accounts pretending to be journalists to upload their take on a recent event that happened anywhere over the world. This causes an easier way for the account to raise their specific point of view on an event while it becomes harder for the reader to check the sources and the magnitude of objectivity in the news item. An example of such an account is @pubity, that is followed by 34,4m accounts. Pubity posts their take on the news, without citing a source anywhere. It makes statements that many people read and are not thoroughly argued or clearly cited. It is all written down as being facts, without sources to back it up with.
Leaving a reaction in the comment section
While the real source of information becomes blurrier, the big global village that’s seen through social media also causes polarization. Due to these social media platform as melting pots of cultures, news items can be interpreted in many different ways. Because everyone with an account has the option to leave a reaction underneath the media post, suddenly this becomes a place where discussion takes place. Due to all different cultures, quite often these discussions gain a negative tone of speech due to misunderstandings, statements without nuance etc. Quickly reading the comments on a random post of Pubity, you can already see a lot of discussions taking place within such a comment section.
Social media as a news platform: yes or no?
Concluding, there should be a thorough research being done to really determine if the structure of a social media platform is the most compatible for spreading the news. It has its positive points, but with those, there comes a lot of negativity that causes problems within (the digital) society.
What do you think the current best way to spread the news is? Leave an argued reaction in the comments!
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