Social Media is for Idiots
Unlike the articles I talk about, I swear this isn’t clickbait… or is it?
This is the power of clickbait. If, like me, you’re heavily invested in social media you’ll know that this is a huge problem. I don’t mean the minor clickbait articles that occasionally appear on your Facebook timelines with headlines like “ YOU WON’T BELIEVE HOW SHE LOST 400lbs”, or “Miracle Vegetable Can Cure Syphilis”. What I am taking about is ‘Fake News’.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the term ‘Fake News’. Donald Trump has spoken heavily about it. For the U.S. President, ‘Fake News’ is any news which does not conform to his belief system. This is not the definition of the term which I am applying in this context. I am talking about the misleading news that all news agencies have run in their stories, without the required research and not having taken all variables into account. To Trump, ‘Fake News’ has a liberal left-wing agenda. This is simply not true. All newspapers are guilty of this, whether they be left-wing media or conservative right-wing media, as Zuckerberg states “the hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics”.
On November 13th 2016, the creator and owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg released a statement on the site regarding the influx of ‘fake news’ that was being spread through his site. Although his statement was geared primarily towards articles about the U.S. Election, he was also speaking on a broader scale and addressing sources which do not give the entire truth.
“While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted”.
While Facebook’s crackdown aimed to remove articles which were completely false from circulation, they admitted the difficulty of this when they found that satirical articles were often confused with the truth.
Popular YouTuber Philip DeFranco, who presents ‘The Philip DeFranco Show’ has recently covered this topic in his videos, and has implored journalists to “please not try to break something first, break it right”. This was in reference to a video leaked to TMZ from the set of the film ‘A Dogs Purpose’ which was edited to seem as if a dog was being mistreated and abused on the set of the film. Big news sources such as The BBC and The Guardian, as well as more internet based sources such as Buzzfeed and E! all jumped on this story, without any further information, and ran headlines claiming animal abuse (albeit the Broadsheet publications were more careful). In the past week, however, after an investigation by the Animal Humane Association, it was found that “the video had been deliberately edited for the purpose of misleading the public and stoking outrage”.
Worst of all is the fact that many of these news sources leave their pre-existing clickbait articles live, without any addendum clarifying information that has changed since the publication of the article. This creates issues for anyone reads the original articles (which continue to circulate through Facebook and Twitter etc) but is not aware of the changes that have since occurred. With the aforementioned example, as of writing this, I have yet to see TMZ (who released the video) make any statements regarding the edited footage they receive, a google search displays the old articles when looking for the ‘TMZ A Dogs Purpose’. If our sources of news media and the journalists that we garner our news from do not admit when they have incorrectly conveyed news, how are we supposed to rely on the information?
At the end of the day, the driving factor in the decision to publish news in this way is money. The quicker an article is out there, the more money it will make through ad-revenue. This means that journalistic integrity is compromised as there is no longer a need for accurate information but rather fast information. What is most through provoking is the following idea which is articulated here in the words of Philip DeFranco:
“I am one stupid person with a YouTube show, I am not a journalist, I’m just a guy and the fact that I have higher journalistic standards than most places is so, so sad”.
With thanks to Naomi Gilad
