Most social media users don’t care about sources
You can find videos, art, quotes and so on all over social media nowadays. But how often do you ask yourself who the creator or artist of them is? And isn’t it weird that you see the same pieces of art, the same videos on several Facebook pages and on several Twitter accounts? Wait… is there even a problem with that?
Well, I certainly have a problem with reposting. But what’s even worse than that is not even bothering to mention the origin of reposted content. The places where this can be mainly found are social media like Facebook or Twitter. But you can even see it on TV sometimes — not necessarily in serious news programmes, but in programmes like the German “taff”. One of the things these programmes do is showing random videos and adding “Source: YouTube” in a corner of the screen (YouTube as the source of a video? You don’t say). Would it really be so hard to source the name of the channel or at least the name of the video? This doesn’t really bother most people though and I guess that not a lot of harm is done here. However, there is an area in which it does quite some harm to the people who are not being sourced.
Now we have to come back to social media, the place where all kinds of information are spreading in a very short amount of time. Besides those funny or inspirational quotes you see all over the place nowadays (note how the same quotes appear on so many different Facebook pages… and no one ever cares about who even thought of them), one thing that is being shared — actually, reposted — is art. Facebook even has that great “share a post” option, Twitter has a “retweet” function, but for some reason people still feel the need to go through the trouble of saving the picture and reposting it on their profile. Finding the original artist of a piece of art becomes impossible this way.
To me, it’s almost a bit scary to see that hardly anyone sees the problem behind reposting things on the internet without caring about the origins of the things they repost. People simply don’t care about sources. This example can be linked to news media as well. Why is it so easy for fake news to spread? Because people don’t care about sources here either. It’s easier to just look at a piece of art and admire it for a few seconds before you keep scrolling through your feed. It’s easier to just believe everything you read (doing your own research is so much trouble after all). But why do people act so carelessly when it comes to reposting and sourcing? Has it really become so normal that people don’t even see that this could possibly be wrong? Do people have to have their own creations reposted somewhere on the internet to see the problem behind it? I wish it wouldn’t even have to come this far.
