The positives of information in the era of social media //
Is social media bad for us? We tend to see the internet and social media only very negatively when it comes to the spread of false or misleading information. But whilst they do play an important role in this game, they also give us voice and allow us to call out misinformation spread by traditional media outlets. Before social media, traditional media owned exclusive rights to storytelling – now anyone can tell a story. Still, while addressing an old problem, the internet created a new one: in a world with so many voices, how do we choose who to trust? The challenge we now have before us as society is to create accountability in the industry without threatening freedom of expression, and to find unbiased ways to easily identify and sponsor good quality content.
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We often think about the internet and the ‘alternative sources of information’ it has enabled when we talk about the ‘era of fake news’. Anyone can start blogs, write Facebook posts, create WhatsApp chains and record YouTube videos with very little accountability for the information in them. With the exception of a few tabloids, we blame those content creation platforms and not traditional media for the current (mis)information crisis.
In reality, however, a lot of misinformation is spread by the ‘traditional’ media. Of course, traditional media outlets tend to be on the average more reliable than a social media post. They have professionals gathering, editing and reviewing data that is published, and a reputation to protect. But they can still fail. Remember when Time magazine, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the New York Times and the National Post, among others, published that our attention span was down 8 seconds, less than that of a goldfish? Not only this was false, as later unveiled by the BBC, but the sources cited in those articles never really ran such a study. Sometimes failing to provide accurate information isn’t intentional, and sometimes it might as well be (see reasons why newspapers spread misinformation).
In the past, we didn’t have much choice but to trust traditional media. We hoped media outlets would do a good job, and, if not, that other media outlets would let us know. Because they were the only means to get informed – and charged for the service – they had the resources to generally do a good job. But when they didn’t, they influenced large masses of people in the wrong direction (see the history of newspapers). Not to be fooled – newspapers and other types of media can still influence people at a very large scale, but people can now reply back. In the 1930s, for example, a radio broadcast by CBS scared millions of people when it falsely announced that the country was being invaded by aliens. If this happened today, thousands of social media posts and pictures would immediately call out the lie, but, at the time, the fake attack caused widespread panic.
Misinformation spread by traditional media feels a bit different. Most of the times, it isn’t really false information, but fragments of the truth put together in such a way that you might be lead to a faulty conclusion (see is fake news really fake). This is particularly dangerous because, as the facts themselves can be verified, it becomes harder to identify the bias in the story (see 10 signs of a bad article). In a world with freedom of expression – an intrinsic element of our democracies – very rarely are they held accountable for what is said. Think about the huge power that traditional media thus had in their hands before the internet: A handful of people – often powerful, and politically connected – owned exclusive rights to storytelling (see storytelling as a tool of control). They could govern – and trade on – public opinion, with little repercussion. This doesn’t mean everyone did it, but it is definitely a dangerous power to be laying around.
The advent of the internet and the democratization of information didn’t just give people wider ears but also bigger voices. They meant we could now express our disagreement and call out bias in the media when we thought we saw it. Today we are all members of the media. Publishers still have a lot of power in their hands but, for the first time, they have to deal with normal people supervising, challenging and even competing with their content on a large scale. Failing makes them more easily exposed. Of course, many if not most of the times those players are antagonised by false or emotionally charged arguments made by poorly informed people. But the discredit of traditional media is at least partially also their own fault. Some may argue social media did more harm than good, promoting social isolation, moral degradation and the hate and cancel cultures. But it didn’t necessarily make us dumb – rather it exposed incoherences that were already widespread across the many layers of society, from ordinary people to relevant institutions.
“The advent of the internet and the democratization of information didn’t just give people wider ears but also bigger voices. They meant we could now express our disagreement and call out bias in the media when we thought we saw it. Today we are all members of the media. Publishers still have a lot of power in their hands but, for the first time, they have to deal with normal people supervising, challenging and even competing with their content on a large scale.”
This new dynamic also made it much harder for traditional outlets to do a good job. Not only they’ve become largely discredited but, in a world with free information, they also have less money to hire professionals and produce good content. Stuck in a fight for clicks, they often need to adjust their communication strategy and fight misleading and emotionally-charged content with other misleading and emotionally-charged content in order to gain views and retain their audience.
But if giving voices to people isn’t really all bad, it does bring a new challenge: how do we choose, in this new, vast and overwhelming universe of information, what and who to believe? If we can’t rely on internet amateurs, it’s also hard to rely on traditional outlets simply for their credentials (see who owns the truth). We’ve seen the rise of fact-checking institutions, but they are run by a few humans who are also prone to bias, and cannot possibly check the all information produced and shared on a daily basis. Holding those spreading misinformation accountable is key, but giving a few people in the government or regulating bodies the power to decide what is true or false is a threat to our freedom of expression and might lead to terrible outcomes.
Alternatives like Beehive seek a different route. Beehive doesn’t rely on one source of truth, but on a combination of the valuable tools we now have at hand. On readers’ knowledge at large scale, favouring those who read more and more balanced news. On an algorithm that doesn’t define what is true, but favours those who follow best practices like giving numbers within sufficient context or using peer-review sources, and that punishes one-sided and emotionally-charged content. And on a range of respectable fact checkers, when those are available. It is a fully independent organisation not linked to any newspapers, corporations or political parties. Through its article-level rating system, it creates accountability not by silencing anyone, but by exposing bad ratings and promoting those with higher scores. And it allows any reader, without a huge investment of time, to easily identify articles more likely to be reliable from all parts of the political spectrum.
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