Last weekend, I had a spirited debate about the validity of using Facebook (and by extension social media) as a respected and credible news source. While social media certainly has many attractive qualities, chiefly it’s speed and widespread reach, it has many downsides that override much of the good it can do. In fact, when look evaluated as a whole, social media has the ability to do serious damage.
The one conceit I have to make right up front is that social media, by virtue of the diverse user base, can bring nearly limitless points of view and sources of news to millions of people. Anyone that has viewed a Facebook or Twitter feed can appreciated seeing the numerous status updates and the various topics they touch on. Stories ranging from sports to politics can dominate a users screen, depending on the friends they have and the pages they subscribe too.
The problem with this setup is that it relies on the intelligence and discretion of users, something that has to be questioned every time there is a story about someone who decides to click a link that promises to make them rich or sell the great products for cheap only to have their computer infected with a massive virus. These situations are almost always a scam and too often dupe users into falling for them. The same unfortunate traits of users often apply to the propagation of news across social media. One only has to look at stories like this, about a miraculous cancer cure, that spread like wildfire on the internet and turned out to be completely wrong.
Certainly some blame should fall on the users of sites like Facebook that post stories such as this, only to find out later that what they shared was completely bogus. After all, users are the ones blindly posting these stores. But why should we blame average people for being, well, average? Average internet users aren’t trained researchers, nor are they wildly discriminant about what they post. People have been getting things wrong by word of mouth for as long as there has been word of mouth. The problem with social media becoming the 21st century word of mouth is the sheer amount of people it can reach in such a short time and that the information is posted to one of many recognized websites, such as Facebook, that, for good or bad, people put their trust in.
The other massive problem with social media news is the desire of users to get in on, or ahead of, the current hot trend. One of the downsides of the speed with which social media works is the unfortunate side effect of reducing the attention span of the average user to something akin to the average goldfish.
Three weeks ago everyone was talking about Jeremy Lin and his on court exploits in the NBA. Now he is a social media has been and the Kony 2012 movement has not only run it’s course, but we are already in Kony backlash mode. The problem with mentioning these two topics in the same sentence is that they are on such opposite sides of the spectrum of importance that it does a disservice to both by treating them the equally. Overstating the importance of Jeremy Lin in the world of basketball is a fair bit different than turning a Ugandan warlord, guilty of crimes against humanity, into an internet sensation.
Having such a weighty topic treated with cavalier abandon by so many is appalling. Many people feel that watching the Kony 2012 video or click a link to donate a few dollars is a good thing, but I see it as a tremendous act of disrespect and devaluing of ithe topic by marginalizing it and making Kony 2012 no more important than the latest sports or media sensation. Using social media for news requires very little investment in the subject matter. Everything is presented as over the top important, demanding immediate attention and designed for maximum emotional impact, rather than maximum dissemination of information which a more traditional curated and tiered news outlet would aim to achieve.
I hope, like many others, that the Kony 2012 phenomenon will prompt change, but not the change many others are hoping for. I hope that this will be a reflection point for our society about what we consider credible news and the validity of using social media as means to get information.
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