Americans believe social networks make the news worse
Link: https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/02/study-on-social-networks-effect-on-news/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAiA6biIIkGfupYqjSsLxMil6PkNsrMFjMEcgQUXVY6uJ1KBM_c8z7QLVpUVKH7XQdv66U-fDw_nDDYpKaWGNJ8_C01Bt2YiLovdE6TEL6rrpTNiKftjPsRqL7iF9QZrKBoYvU9EvSFWZcKiOAVDqbweKzIqXCdoZLxiGkzEN-nd
In this study conducted by Pew, it was determined that “62 percent of American adults believe social media companies have ‘too much control’ over news, and 55 percent believe these companies have created a “worse mix” of news through their feed algorithms and other editorial choices”. Participants were concerned with the quality of the of the news in their social streams and 88% believed “that social networks favored news outlets with ‘attention-grabbing articles’ — that is, sensationalist fare”. Some other interesting findings of the study were that; 84% stated that sites with many social followers are preferred by companies, 79% thought news with a specific political stance are favored by companies, 53% determined that one sided news is “a very big problem”, and 51% stated the same about fake/inaccurate news. Additionally, Republicans were a lot more likely than Democrats to believe social media had too much control and argue that the sites leaned to the left. Regardless, this has not deterred people from using these sites as the percentage of people that rely on social media for news has substantially increased over the past two years.
This study is quite important is it illustrates the challenges that social media companies face as they try to improve their news. It is crucial that these companies make changes to their algorithms and/or add human curation as we have learned in class their one directional flow impacts a substantial amount of people and can have destructive influence. These social media companies represent the nodes most centrally located /embedded within a network as they are connected / linked to a vast number of people / users. Anything shared by these nodes will impact such a large amount of people that may then further share the negative information thus corrupting even more nodes / people versus if just one user that less embedded / more on the outside of the network were to share something such as fake news. Due to these companies’ significant and powerful location within a network it is imperative that they make efforts to scrutinize the news on their platform and eliminate fake / inaccurate information that could be propagated thus corrupting a considerable amount of users.