Where People Get their News and What We Can Do About It

 

As online spaces become the dominant setting for communication, discussion, and discourse in human society, we need to reassess the role social media plays in news. While these spaces are prime places for professionals to update people about the world, it is also an ideal environment for disinformation to spread. The freedom and anonymity of the Internet often removes the sense of culpability that traditional avenues of news often have built into them. To properly ascertain this situation, three questions need answering. First, what are the major sources of news online. Second, why are they becoming the new source of authority? Third, who has the power to address these issues and what should they do to minimize the tide of misleading information.

The first question can be difficult to address, because in theory, anyone can be a source of news online. Anyone can post video or photos of a major event that informs the national or worldwide narrative surrounding it. Thankfully, after looking at the data, a few trends emerge. It is becoming increasingly evident that blogs are a huge player in shaping political discourse in this country. To start, there were an estimated 31.7 million bloggers counted in the United States in the year 2020. The majority of those bloggers use social media to spread their content, 97% of all blog posts are shared on social media (Lin). Despite these obscene numbers, only about 7% of the population have exposure to these blogs (Dreznar).  So, the question is, why are blogs so influential if that is the case?

There are quite a few reasons for their omnipresence. The first is that while a minimum amount of the public read these blogs, 83% of journalists read them regularly and take their content seriously. As a result, these opinions end u; spreading and shaping narratives in the rest of the news cycle (Drezner). In addition, the format of news blogs also makes them feel more accessible and trustworthy. A survey shows that quality o content is the most important factor in a blog’s success, and professional bloggers who earn over 50,000 annually attest that the demand for quality has only risen throughout the years (Lin). The average amount of time to write a blog post in 2020 was a little under four hours. The general conception is that more detail and description equate to higher quality in people’s minds. The average length of a post, which was about 800 words a few years ago, is now closer to 1,200 (Lin). Theses statistics show that blogging has ceased to be a fun novelty on the internet and is now its own industry with a specific set of standards.

And the services that help people create blogs make it easier for users to spread. WordPress, which posts 78 million new entries every month, is currently the most used online blogging service after Tumblr (Lin). As someone who is familiar with WordPress, I can attest to how much the service gears itself toward professional bloggers who are looking for the widest amount of exposure. While creating a blog, WordPress offers a score out of 100 that illustrates how visible your post theoretically is. It also takes you step by step and shows you how to increase this score, such as heavy use of keywords that make the article more likely to appear on web searches, internal and external links, longer word count (WordPress recommends 6,000), and having a short URL (under 79 characters). Then, when you try to publish, WordPress brings up a menu that allows you control how the article gets posted to all your linked social media accounts.

In a sense, journalists are still doing the same job online (investigating the validity of potential stories and sources) the online world simply forces them to work on a much bigger scale. An example of this is when Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012. Journalists were tasked with searching through social media and filtering out a staggering number of old images, composite images, or images taken form movies and find accurate representation of the situation. Luckily, there are plenty of tools that make these tasks feasible. Free online resources such as Spokeo (helps search for people based on their username), Wolfram Alpha, and Google maps give journalists an opportunity to track down the people behind potential sources and validate their claims (Nolan). However, the amount of data to shift through is often too much for reporters to accomplish on their own. YouTube, for example, uploads 72 new hours of footage every minute! (Nolan) When journalists mess up, it has drastic consequences, and what makes it even scarier is that everyone is now a part of the journalistic process thanks to social media; everyone is involved with updating people’s understanding of current events.

If journalists are unable to carry this burden alone, then there needs to be an additional barrier between purposefully false accounts and massive online exposure. From a practical standpoint, the most obvious answer is to have the platforms that host this content (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to filter out misleading data. Some steps have already been taken in this field. Twitter introduced the ability to quote Tweets which allowed people to contribute and more openly remark upon posts in a way that encourages contributing to the conversation over blind reposting. Facebook recently announced the #NoFalseNewsZone campaign where it teamed up with multiple media companies to educate their userbase and prevent the spread of false news stories in Nigeria (“Breaking: Facebook”).

In the face of a post-truth era, multiple steps are needed to safeguard people from an inaccurate picture of the world. Western democracies such as the United States place a high value on the virtue of self-governance, but effective decision making is only possible when the people doing it are well-informed and apply facts and logic to their final choice. By holding bloggers, journalists, and social media sites to a higher standard, we are protecting the wider interests of the population and securing a better future.

 

References

Drezner, Daniel W, and Henry Farrell. “The Power and Politics of Blogs.” ResearchGate, Nov. 2007, www.researchgate.net/publication/226771010_The_Power_and_Politics_of_Blogs.

Lin, Ying. “10 Blogging Statistics You Need to Know in 2021 [Infographic].” Oberlo, Oberlo, 5 Aug. 2021, www.oberlo.com/blog/blogging-statistics.

Nolan, Markham, director. How to Separate Fact and Fiction Online. TED, Nov. 2012, www.ted.com/talks/markham_nolan_how_to_separate_fact_and_fiction_online#t-170587.

Omiyale, Aduragbemi. “Facebook, Others Launch #Nofalsenewszone Campaign: Business Post.” Business Post Nigeria, Aduragbemi Omiyale, 8 Sept. 2021, businesspost.ng/general/facebook-others-launch-nofalsenewszone-campaign/.