Monday, October 2, 2017

Do you ever find yourself relying on social media to update you about current events? I get it, you want to keep up-to-date with your friends’ latest Twitter posts, but also want to know what’s going on with the government status. But should you be looking for both of those things on the same site?

I think with certain information social media can be a credible source of news, but as consumers we must take precautions to know whether or not the news we are receiving is truthful and reliable. I believe that people should rely more on traditional news sources and multiple news sources, not just one, because social media is not always accurate.

Studies from the PEW Research Center show that in 2016, 62% of people used Facebook to get a portion of their news while 45% of them used it as their main source of news. The second highest social media platform for news was YouTube with 18% of Americans using it as a source of news. The next highest was Twitter with 15% of Americans using Twitter while 11% of them received their news from it.

Is social media really that reliable?

My Personal Experience

Monday, October 2, 2017 was the day my favorite artist was presumed dead, Tom Petty. It broke my heart that such an amazing artist left us so soon. I had gotten the news from social media, Twitter to be exact.

Soon, I found out that the incident didn’t happen when then media said it did. People were tweeting “Tom is still alive, there is still hope” or “He is still fighting. He’s not gone yet.”

I was overall, confused. Why would they say he died when he hadn’t yet? Is he going to live? What’s going on?

Petty wasn’t in great condition as he was found unconscious in full cardiac arrest in his house, but apparently they had resuscitated him and had taken him to the hospital that day. While the media announcement said Petty collapsed early Monday morning, original reports claimed the incident happened Sunday night.

I was left confused, along with many other fans. I was left wondering had he collapsed and died on Monday or had he collapsed on Sunday? Had he made it through the night and died on Monday?

The fact that there was some confusion about the whole situation leaves me second guessing everything I hear from the media. Someone got a hold of this information and got it mixed up. The media has a tendency of doing this a lot.

Other Unreliable Cases

Let’s take for example another incident, stated in the article How Fake News Tricks your Brain, with the Pacific tsunami alert issued on April 11, 2012. On Twitter and YouTube, videos were showing monster waves hitting the coast of Sumatra and Aceh in Indonesia. However, these were versions of the 2004 tsunami and other dramatic videos, reissued with the 2012 date.

People were seeing these videos and thinking they were from that current tsunami when, in reality, they weren’t. Videos and images are messed with and switched up all the time on the media and it’s hard to know what is the truth anymore.

A study from the Pew Research Center says 57% of social media users expect their news to be fake or largely inaccurate and 36% of people get simply more confused after reading news from social media. That’s a lot of people going onto social media already expecting it to be inaccurate.

If a majority of people already think social media has inaccurate news, why do they still use it? They use it because it’s convenient, it’s easy to access, and they don’t have to go running around looking for it. It’s right there in seconds.

Just because it’s easy to access and it’s convenient doesn’t necessarily mean people should rely on social media to be their main source of news.

I think Tartan Board says it well in his article Social Media is Unreliable as a Source for Real News, “While it may be useful for learning preliminary information about an event, it should only be used as a catalyst to find out more information from a reliable source.”

Here are some easy ways from How Fake News Tricks your Brain to help you understand if what you read on social media is reliable news or not:

· Age- How long has the account been running? Recently created accounts can be sketchy.

· Network- Who is in their network and who follows them? Do you know this account or anyone that follows them?

· Content of the News- Do other sources match up to what this is saying?

· Location - Are they in the location they are tweeting or posting about?

· Updates- Do they make sense and have to do with what they have posted before?

When you’re writing a research paper for class or even typing up a blog, you wouldn’t just get your sources from one site would you? No, of course not. We have always been told get multiple sources. People need to do that with their news from social media, as well, before they can believe anything it says.