Today’s generation is highly networked humans leading a social life mostly on social media
platforms. This sufficiently explains the power of SOCIAL MEDIA. Unfortunately, social media
has involuntarily turned into a media entity too. I get most of the news updates from it. We all
do, we can least deny it. But are these news updates coming from trusted news source??? It’s
time to think about how much you can trust it, how reliable is it?
Is it a reflection of reality? Certainly not!
We blindly digest news on the go. Do we care about when the information was released and by who? Social Media gives power to any person with any background, with any mission to become a news reporter. It’s surely baffling to determine what you can and cannot trust. It may be breaking news story fast, but it can also break the news too. In many cases, media focuses on a fragment of a sentence that makes the person sound crazy. Lack of centralized gatekeepers leaves a lot of room for exaggeration, due to which misconceptions always spread further than correction. Strangely, we hardly trust those news sources that tell the truth, instead, we trust the ones that tell us what we want to hear or believe. Isn’t it?
Facebook and other social media platforms repeatedly deny that it is a media entity, or that it needs to behave like one, or that it has any responsibilities to inform people about the world around them in any kind of journalistic way which is very true for sure. Restoring the genuity by installing human editors to weed such things out is near to impossible. Moreover, why would they do that? From its point of view, engagement is the number one metric, not accuracy.
It’s our job! We must learn to find what is gold and what is gold plated. However, detecting deception in social media needs some effort but spotting fake news is not difficult as it sounds like. Before believing any news content we must dig in to know when that information was first created, does it have a different context than it does now?. We definitely need to consider the source, the author. It is trustworthy to hear from people who are directly involved in the news, and that makes it more likely for the truth to emerge.
But, one thing is for sure, social media is not the best resource for accurate information.
Is it a reflection of reality? Certainly not!
We blindly digest news on the go. Do we care about when the information was released and by who? Social Media gives power to any person with any background, with any mission to become a news reporter. It’s surely baffling to determine what you can and cannot trust. It may be breaking news story fast, but it can also break the news too. In many cases, media focuses on a fragment of a sentence that makes the person sound crazy. Lack of centralized gatekeepers leaves a lot of room for exaggeration, due to which misconceptions always spread further than correction. Strangely, we hardly trust those news sources that tell the truth, instead, we trust the ones that tell us what we want to hear or believe. Isn’t it?
Facebook and other social media platforms repeatedly deny that it is a media entity, or that it needs to behave like one, or that it has any responsibilities to inform people about the world around them in any kind of journalistic way which is very true for sure. Restoring the genuity by installing human editors to weed such things out is near to impossible. Moreover, why would they do that? From its point of view, engagement is the number one metric, not accuracy.
It’s our job! We must learn to find what is gold and what is gold plated. However, detecting deception in social media needs some effort but spotting fake news is not difficult as it sounds like. Before believing any news content we must dig in to know when that information was first created, does it have a different context than it does now?. We definitely need to consider the source, the author. It is trustworthy to hear from people who are directly involved in the news, and that makes it more likely for the truth to emerge.
But, one thing is for sure, social media is not the best resource for accurate information.
Hello, My name is Publik Talk. I'm a self-employed from the India.
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