Social Media and Truth

Social media connects the entire world in one simple forum, and it allows for a continuous free flow of information.  As a busy working professional and graduate student, I rely heavily on new media outlets, such as social media sites, as my daily source of information.  I try to set aside time to sit down and watch a nightly newscast or to read a newspaper, but having access to information 24/7 through my mobile device has made many traditional media outlets obsolete in my life. 

Although having unlimited access to information is beneficial, it is not always easy to identify if the information I am receiving from these sites are completely accurate.  As consumers and active participants in the information creation and sharing process, one should look critically at the information they are receiving.  In their text Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel discuss the role of social media in reporting, and state, “They [social media sites] are ways of conveying information, but they do not dictate the nature of the information conveyed.”  Unlike traditional media, consumers may not be able to determine the source of information from a social media report, which makes it challenging to draw conclusions about its truth.  Even when social media reporting is coming from trusted sources like CNN or Fox News, the journalism of assertion (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010) seems to be taking over in the world of new media.  Society wants their information “right now,” so the pressure to provide that often allows for inaccurate initial reports that will be followed by corrections in a future follow-up story.      

To decipher through the world of instant news reporting, one has to examine the source and forum in which the information is presented in order to draw educated and informed conclusions from the report.  Additionally, perception is also a key factor when reading any type of media.  As NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard stated in a 2010 radio interview that, “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”  Reporting is not meant to be advocating (Shepard, 2010), but social media has allowed for opinion based and bias reporting to disguise itself as truth.  Trained journalists are not the only ones delivering information; consumers can now create and share content, and that is what makes it difficult to sort through true information or bias exposés.   

I looked back on the last week and tried to pinpoint just one piece of news that I had learned from a social media outlet, and it was difficult for me because almost all of the information I receive comes from social media.  Over dinner with my husband, I will always ask “oh, did you hear about…” a particular event and he will usually say “yes” or that he “didn’t get to check Facebook or Twitter today.”  This really portrays the new trend of how we receive information.  I find that the place I turn to most to follow news reports is Twitter because I can find additional reporting and user conversations by following the “hashtag.”  Twitter is a great example of how fact and opinion are intermixed together as all of the discussions regarding a particular topic are grouped together under a “hashtag.”  Most recently, I followed the initial developing reports of the Malaysian Airlines disappearance, and it was amazing to see how many people were “tweeting” about the same topic.  This, however, also depicts how quickly misinformation can spread when millions of social media users are engaging in a conversation about the same topic.  

The process of receiving and sharing information has changed drastically with the introduction of social media.  Consumers are more involved in the media process than ever before, and they are faced with the challenge to decide what media sources are accurate and who they will trust for their daily information.  It is not that all social media reporting is inaccurate; it is that the lines of journalism are now blurred, and fact and opinion have become interchangeable.  Consumers and contributors to media have a new found responsibility to not only provide accurate information, but to also examine the information that they are receiving in order to create an honest exchange of information.