New News
By Jarrod Benn
Throughout the years of social media’s dominance it has made a large effect on todays age of journalism, the fact that social media can now be considered a source for news proves to us it’s effects. The way people consume news has even been changed, in the past we used newspapers and then a majority moved on to televised news sources. Nowadays due to social medias impact that is where pretty much everyone consumes their news, social media has made news so accessible that people who didn’t follow any news updates before are now up to date on everything because of social media.
One of the main things holding back social medias news coverage is the rise of fake news, fake news has always been around just not in the quantity that it is in now. There are stories that are clearly fake and can be debunked by anyone that float around as well as stories that you would need some media literacy in order to debunk, and not everyone has that skill. The more a fake story seems to be true, the higher the chances of people mass spreading the story which leads to mass misinformation.
Facebook has dealt with the spread of misinformation on their site in recent times and claim to be taking the steps in order to correct this. Facebook said it will “lessen the reach of groups that often share misinformation”
in order to do this they will determine what groups are spreading false stories and push them lower in the newsfeed in order to prevent most accounts from seeing the content.
I don’t think that this fully rids the site of their problems but instead pushes off the problem, I think a better tactic would be to determine where the bad content is coming from and just get rid of the source or even just the content. Facebook says this wouldn’t work for them because they don’t just simply remove content because it’s been deemed fake. So news sources that publish misinformed content will just be able to keep publishing.
