News in Social Media

Carlee Swartz  

carleelynn2017@gmail.com 

 

Since social media has powered through as one of the top platforms to receive news and info, there is no secret it has cut corners on ethical codes and morals. The important rule for any journalist and top news organization is to stay neutral with their stories; no opinions or biases can be included in their articles. Yet, we still seem to find some biased stories that lead readers towards one side of the story more so than the other. This is where the ethics of journalism can get twisted into many knots.

Journalists are known to have an edge to their reporting because this attracts clicks and readers on their social media accounts. This hasn't always been the case since social media wasn't a top media-outlet for news before the early 2000s. Now that a vast majority of people rely upon the internet for their news, there have been conversations throughout news organizations about updating their policy.  They are saying that there cannot be any promotion of political views or offensive comments on social media accounts.

Articles such as this one from Market Watch, cover the topic of how journalism has changed from broadcasting factual news to broadcasting news they know their audience wants to see. It said in a poll done by U.S News that 63% of people say that there are no longer any objective news sources that they can trust and 66% say that internet news has only divided people instead of uniting them.                                

Picture source: https://thepopularlist.com/reliable-news-sources/

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The problem isn't just with news organizations, it's with the way our technology and media works. Technology has made it astronomically easier to personalize data and advertisements to specific audience segments. This makes it easier to post stories that may resonate better with one group than the other. It also makes it easy for anyone, not just journalists, to create "stories" about a subject that has no reliable source for their information.

In an article from Forbes, it touches on a story about how during the election of 2016, a group of kids was able to create a fake news site to publish a story that said Hillary Clinton votes were found in an Ohio warehouse. They used bots to push the story to trending topics and made money from the Google ads they were generating.

Journalists play an important role in our society which is to broadcast quality news to the people, and if they ruin the trust of the people, they ruin their credibility as a journalist and news platform as a whole. As technology and social media make it easier to view and create content, the risk of getting factual news will maintain to decrease unless top news organizations and platforms make a commitment to re-evaluate their policies when it comes to posting online.