Since the latest presidential race, the expression “fake news” has become widespread; not only for politicians, but everyday people use it either as a joke or a jibe or a serious comment. So when I saw an article about news, particularly fake news, on Facebook a number of questions came to mind. How many people are getting news from Facebook? And why do they expect Facebook to do a better job of vetting the news than anyone else.
A little over a year ago Facebook began putting red flags on news stories debunked by third-party fact-checkers, labeling them as fake news. Unfortunately the scheme backfired causing them to change tactics late last year. “Users who wanted to believe the false stories had their fevers ignited and they actually shared the hoaxes more.” Instead Facebook began showing related articles from trusted news sources. Now, instead of calling attention to news they decide is incorrect, they reduce the size of the link post in News Feed.
But I thought Facebook was in the business of bringing the world together (or something like that) so they can earn revenue by delivering eyeballs to ads, not serving as a news source. Apparently it’s both. And more people seem to be getting news from there.
A Pew Research poll from the summer of 2016 gives a fairly up-to-date picture. Overall, most people still get their news from television, though that doesn’t apply to the under-50 crowd who rely more on the Internet. Newspapers, especially among younger Americans lag far behind.
The survey goes into a lot of detail about news sources. For example, those who“ever get news on a mobile device” rose from 54% in 2013 to 72% three year later. Of online news consumers, 36% say they often get news from professional news organizations and about 15% from friends, but they trust both sources about the same – having either “a lot of trust” or “some trust” at a level of about 76%. Trust in social media as a source of news is much lower, but still at about 34% in the combined categories of “a lot of trust” or “some trust.”
There seems to be trend, and Pew Research is tracking that trend. Overall, television is losing ground to the Internet, radio is stable and newspapers continue to fall out of favor. As far as the Facebook question, from 2012 to 2016 the number of U.S. adults reporting seeing news on social media rose from 49% to 62% and then up to 67% by last October, with those citing it as a frequent source moving from 18% to 20%. So apparently Facebook is right to be concerned about fake news, as more Americans move from newspapers and TV to the Internet and social media for their news and Congress is eager to grill them and others about why they didn’t intervene when the fake news appears.
This brings up a couple of concerns. First, the worry that people trust news from their friends as much as they do news from professional news organizations, while at the same time some of their friends are more likely to share bogus information that happens to agree with what they want to believe than to share true stories.
The second is the notion that the government holds these companies accountable to, in a sense, censor the news they pass along. With ¾ believing that the professional news sources are biased, what guarantees that the Internet companies can be more responsible? What prevents them from mimicking their own customers and be more prone to pass along “facts” that agree with what they want to believe?
As everyone gets so busy that they leave these decisions to others, critical thinking goes away and we move closer to the concept behind 1984.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Click again on the title to add a comment