Social media has allowed everyday citizens to become authors, editors, and publishers of news and information. Do you believe that social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?
I think social media has decreased the quality of news and information. The dangers of having unreliable news sources and so many social media tools is the small fraction of time it takes for false information to spread around the world. When social media does initiate the spreading of news, it really is up to the reader whether or not they take the information for face value or to do further research to confirm what they read is correct or not.
When I think of social media passing out news, I think of it spreading out in a "broken telephone" sort of way. Meaning, the content of the news travels from person to person, post to post, that throughout the travel the content changes. People like to exaggerate stories to make them sound bigger than what they are.
Just as easily as adding something to a story to make it sound cooler, someone may flat out lie and make up a news story. When it comes to social media and everyday people sharing news and information there is no way in knowing what is true and what is false. I have always considered news content and information posted throughout social media to be similar to tabloids. There may be factual text, pictures, videos, etc. however, it is important to remember that not all of what we see and hear is the truth.
I recommend going to a traditional media outlet to double-check the news we get from social media to find out if the quality can be trusted or not.
Hey Brittany,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that social media has decreased the quality of the news that is out there today. Your example of "broken telephone" is exactly how it is when news is being spread through social media. Verifying what we read is very important, and even then we have to be leery of traditional media too because they can also get the facts wrong when trying to release "breaking" news.
While I do agree that sometimes some of the information posted from people can be misleading with wrong information, I don’t believe that the whole idea of citizen journalism is bad. Yes it can be like a broken telephone but many good things have come from citizen journalism. News is broken faster around the world and citizens can know what happens as soon as it happens. There are many hidden talents out there that can report and deliver accurate news. Just because some apples are rotten, we can’t let them ruin the whole bunch :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with u social media has decreased the quality of news because the information may not necessarily be factual and also it is very easy to ‘Photoshop’ any picture. If anyone wants to make their news seem more real, they could just add there Photoshop picture.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the fact that getting news information from social media is like "broken telephone", however, the basis of whatever post or comment is twisted from some sort of a truth, therefore you are still getting a jist of what is happening around the world. It is up to the person to look into the fact they are reading instead of just posting it.
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