The process of locating trustworthy and accurate news posts on social media platforms is not at all simple.
Pew Research and the Knight Foundation have just published two in-depth investigations that examine the ways in which people in the United States are interacting with news and politics on social media. A variety of statistics that are remarkable are included in the research; however, the most important thing that I take away from it is that the dissemination of news is a bit of a muddle.
It is not that news has vanished from platforms like as X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram; rather, the manner in which the majority of people are interacting with news information is significantly different from one platform to those other platforms. Also, a significant portion of what people claim to be seeing is not coming from journalists or media organizations, but rather from influencers and other accounts that are not connected to each other.
While the findings of the studies may not come as a surprise, the majority of individuals do not use social media to keep up with the news. Only a small percentage of users on TikTok (41 percent), Instagram (33 percent), and Facebook (37 percent) said that “getting news” was a “major or minor” reason for their use of the network. According to Pew, X was a major exception, with 65 percent of respondents attesting to the fact that they use the service for the purpose of reporting news.
In light of Twitter’s long-standing image as a news source and Meta’s more recent transition away from the media business, this may not come as much of a surprise to anyone. In addition, the majority of users of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have indicated that they encounter some type of content connected to news on these platforms, despite the fact that the majority of users have stated that they do not actively seek for news.
On the other hand, when you delve further into the types of news that participants claim to perceive, the most prominent categories are opinions and “funny posts” concerning current events. Taking a look at the breakdown below: When compared to news stories or “information about a breaking news event,” the number of posts that contained opinions and humorous content was significantly higher across all platforms. Once more, the lone exception to this rule was X, where individuals said that they encounter articles at a rate that is roughly equivalent to that of “funny posts” about the news.
When taking into consideration the sources for news-related posts that were reported by the participants in the study, it is also significant. On every platform with the exception of X, journalists and media organizations are not the most prominent sources of news and information linked to news. On social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it is their friends and family, while on TikTok, it is “other people.” Also fairly high for X is the “other people” category, with seventy-five percent of respondents stating that they are aware of news coming from these sources. It would appear from this that the recommendation algorithms of X and TikTok are responsible for a significant portion of the news items that users get to see on both sites.
In spite of the fact that Pew routinely performs the same kinds of studies at regular intervals, which enables readers to infer patterns over time, this study is fresh new, and as a result, we do not have any historical data to compare any of these statistics to. However, they do, in a general sense, mirror what many people working in the media industry have been going through over the course of the past few years. The amount of traffic that social media platforms generate for publishers is significantly decreasing, and the news is increasingly being filtered through influencers, meme producers, and random accounts that are revealed by algorithms. In addition, it is important to note that the majority of individuals have said that they encounter false news at least “sometimes” across all platforms. In addition, 86 percent of participants said that they had seen news that “seems inaccurate.” This was the case for the group X, which had the largest proportion of persons who consumed news and witnessed journalistic content.
On the other hand, the authors of the paper do not come to any conclusions regarding what all of this implies in general, let alone in an election year when there is growing anxiety about the spread of misinformation that is fueled by artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the survey indicates that it is not at all simple to locate trustworthy and correct news on social media.