Sani Umar Sulaiman
U15MM2009
When people talk about fake news, it majorly focuses on the role of social media in dissemination stories from websites that is either rumor or deliberately- manufactured falsehood. Facebook has come in for so much post-election scrutiny that Markzuckerberg just published a 6,000 word letter that tried to address the fake news problem.
Social media has been a key enabler of the fake news problem, but fake news itself is only one part of a larger ecosystem of misinformation that runs the trend from unintentionally misleading content all the way to deliberate, outright lies.
Social media has contributed to the fragmentation of audience attention for reasons that are closely related to the phenomenon of media democratization. As the explosion in online media sources gave people more and more choices of where jto put their attention, readers and viewers have increasingly gravitated to the specific sources and stories that appeal to their narrow interest worldwide. That created the opportunity for media creators to thrive either politically or financially by serving people the specific news and commentary they wanted to see making it all but inevitable that some folks would start to seize those political and financial opportunities without worrying about whether the content they created was actually true (junk journalism).
Finally, we can’t lay all the blame for misinformation at the doors of social media: it’s also a reflection on generally low levels of media literacy. Many people just don’t know how to judge the accuracy of what they watch, read or hear and fair enough, since many of us came of age in a world that didn’t require the kind of media sophistication you need today. Happily, there are some amazing people and organizations that are at work on the challenge of supporting media literacy, particularly among young people, and they’re using social tools to do it.
If social media is the context in which many media consumers encounter fake news, then it can also be the context in which inaccuracies may be quickly corrected.
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