Social media has allowed everyday citizens to become authors, editors, and publishers of news and information. Do you believe that social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?
In my opinion, Social Media has both increased and decreased the quality of news and information. I do however feel that Social Media has increased the spread of news and information much further than before. There have been many times that I have seen links on Facebook to news sites about stories that would make the local paper but not really national or international news, but since someone on my friends list decided to share the story I was made aware of what was happening. In those instances there was no effect on the quality of the news since it was directly from the reporting source, but it was spread further than it would have been pre-social media times.
There are also news sites that enable people to share news topics that they feel are important, allowing them and others to give their views and opinions on the subject. One example is CNN’s “iReport”, which can be found at http://ireport.cnn.com/ , which has people submitting stories they care about. The only issue with this is that CNN does not verify every story and this has the potential of spreading misleading information. However, only stories that CNN has “vetted” will ever be shown on an actual broadcast.
I am sure we have all had instances of hearing about someone famous dying and then finding out they are very much alive. This is because rumours really fly on Social Media. One person decides to start a rumour and spreads it amongst his contacts online and next thing you know the majority of the world knows because everyone keeps sharing the misleading information without verifying it. So even though you know the person you heard the information from would not intentionally lie about this kind of thing, doesn’t mean that they verified it before they forwarded the information. So my saying to this is “Don’t believe everything you read!!!”
