How Social Media Impacts the News
We live in a truly wonderful time. The internet has connected our world in an unprecedented manner. Everyone with internet access has the entirety of human knowledge at their disposal and a means to contact nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. A product of the internet is what we refer to as “social media.” Social media makes it extremely easy to keep in touch with friends, family, and practically the whole world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and a multitude of other social networking sites provides a simple and effective way to share information with thousands of people who can in turn share that information with thousands more and so on and so on. This method referred to as sharing sparks a chain reaction which inevitably ends up with millions or possibly billions seeing a single article, picture, or post. Unlike ever before a simple funny picture or piece of political commentary can be shown to practically everyone throughout the world in a matter of minutes. This also applies to the news. A simple video showing an earthquake in …show more content…
The people spreading this information aren’t held accountable either as it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where this spread of false information originated. As mentioned earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem if people critically evaluated the article, it also wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t use an unreliable source such as social media as their news source. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that sixty-four percent of the U.S. population uses Facebook and half of that amount uses that site regularly for their news. (Gottfried, Shearer 3) That accounts for one-third of the United Sates using Facebook as an outlet for news. That’s roughly one hundred million people exposed to an unreliable news source. (U.S. Population Live
We live in a truly wonderful time. The internet has connected our world in an unprecedented manner. Everyone with internet access has the entirety of human knowledge at their disposal and a means to contact nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. A product of the internet is what we refer to as “social media.” Social media makes it extremely easy to keep in touch with friends, family, and practically the whole world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and a multitude of other social networking sites provides a simple and effective way to share information with thousands of people who can in turn share that information with thousands more and so on and so on. This method referred to as sharing sparks a chain reaction which inevitably ends up with millions or possibly billions seeing a single article, picture, or post. Unlike ever before a simple funny picture or piece of political commentary can be shown to practically everyone throughout the world in a matter of minutes. This also applies to the news. A simple video showing an earthquake in …show more content…
The people spreading this information aren’t held accountable either as it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where this spread of false information originated. As mentioned earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem if people critically evaluated the article, it also wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t use an unreliable source such as social media as their news source. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that sixty-four percent of the U.S. population uses Facebook and half of that amount uses that site regularly for their news. (Gottfried, Shearer 3) That accounts for one-third of the United Sates using Facebook as an outlet for news. That’s roughly one hundred million people exposed to an unreliable news source. (U.S. Population Live