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Social Media Overtakes Television As Young People's Main Source of News, Says Report (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Of the 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed, 28% cited social media as their main news source, compared with 24% for TV. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism research also suggests 51% of people with online access use social media as a news source. The report, now in its fifth year, is based on a YouGov survey of about 50,000 people across 26 countries, including 2,000 Britons. Facebook and other social media outlets have moved beyond being "places of news discovery" to become the place people consume their news, it suggests. And news via social media is particularly popular among women and young people. The study found Facebook was the most common source -- used by 44% of all those surveyed -- to watch, share and comment on news. Next came YouTube on 19%, with Twitter on 10%. Apple News accounted for 4% in the US and 3% in the UK, while messaging app Snapchat was used by just 1% or less in most countries. According to the survey, consumers are happy to have their news selected by algorithms, with 36% saying they would like news chosen based on what they had read before and 22% happy for their news agenda to be based on what their friends had read. But 30% still wanted the human oversight of editors and other journalists in picking the news agenda and many had fears about algorithms creating news "bubbles" where people only see news from like-minded viewpoints. Most of those surveyed said they used a smartphone to access news, with the highest levels in Sweden (69%), Korea (66%) and Switzerland (61%), and they were more likely to use social media rather than going directly to a news website or app. The report also suggests users are noticing the original news brand behind social media content less than half of the time, something that is likely to worry traditional media outlets.
Can we honestly call the click bait articles on social media news?
stuff that matters. Social media news.
OK, so now we have more people getting their news from facebook than from TV, newspapers or any "traditional" source.
And then look at something like snopes.com to have an idea how much of this so called news are hoaxes, misinformation or blatant lies*!
And none of them gets an even remote feeling that something as unreliable as facebook is as usefull as a rubber knife when you treat it as news source. Yes, it's great for cat pictures. And I love the "25 incredible stupid things stupid people did" stuff. But that's it. It's a SOCIAL media. Is your social environment a regular part of the news? No? See?
* and sometimes misunderstood satire
bickerdyke
of young people.
You read it here first!
Social media? Gosh, the only thing more unreliable than the news channels.
Did you know, Facebook are soon going to make you pay unless you click this link before the 1st of June/July/August/September?
Did you know: this local crime happened (actually four years ago) and this little girl needs money for a life-saving operation (actually dead already), etc. etc. etc.?
Social media is the new gossip. The junk on there is really atrocious, and when news is discussed most of what pops up on social media is rumour and/or just outright lies.
If anything, my primary source of "news" is a web search. Not even a news search because that's just mainstream news lumped into one item. Even things like Wikinews at least have some element of journalism and truth to them more often that the TV channels or papers.
But social media? Really? Maybe that's how you hear *OF* a story, because you're always connected as a young kid, but for that to be your source of details of the news? That's just scary.
When the low standards of TV news are too high, turn to Facebook!
That would explain why most kids now adays are so ill informed. My younger sister is 30 and lives on social media, it never ceases to amaze me the shit she believes or doesn't know about, especially around science where the just plain WRONG information is more abundant than facts on social media.
Pair this with the recent problems at Reddit... :-/
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
I'm closer to senior citizenship and get more news from Facebook than TV. Basically because I nowadays turn on the TV very rarely for live events (like the current football championship, the eurovision song contest or election results like the UK leaving Europe next week) and it stays off otherwise. If my current satellite TV system breaks down it will not get replaced, the usage doesn't justify keeping it. If I had to pay for TV beyond the TV license fee, it'd be gone already. So it doesn't suprise me that young people no longer care for TV as a news source or an anything source. It rarely covers important issues anyway. Of course I get most of my news from news web sites and blogs nowadays...
Crips I stopped watching the news or reading a paper more than 5 years ago as the feed of news from the internet was far better and faster.
Hey 18-24 year olds, get with the program you luddites!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
36% saying they would like news chosen based on what they had read before
22% happy for their news agenda to be based on what their friends had read
1.2 hours of Facebook and Snapchat per day for an average user
How much time spent consuming world information that is NOT just like news you have read before or news that your friends liked?
If you think the United States is polarized now, just wait as a greater and greater percentage of citizens are spoon fed only like-minded opinions from birth to adulthood and then see how tolerant everyone is of differing viewpoints. The rift can only widen, while the chances of finding common ground can only diminish as this trend continues. The truly stunning part of this, is that these consumers of "news" actually prefer it that way.
It's the same liberal echo chamber that older people surround themselves with, just in a digital form.
I'm 54, and haven't relied on Television for news in well over a decade.
Social media ? Not so much. Although I do use it as a bird-dogging tool. . . ."crowd-searching" the news, and then checking a few other sources.
Lately, the noise-to-signal ratio on social media, and Fecesbook and Twatter, respectively, has approached 99%. . . .
This story reminds me of the Weird Al Yankovic song, "Midnight Star".
The psuedo scientific drivel my wife reads in these moronic magazines just beggars belief sometimes. Whether its health, diet or beauty advice, most of it seems to be either made up on the spot with no scientific basis, either by the know-nothing neurotic maghag "journalists" , or by whatever crank they've waved some money at and who can string together enough semi coherent sentences to create an article out of. I genuinely believe some of these magazines should come with a health warning on the cover because of the rubbish they peddle to impressionable girls.
It's funny cause Slashdot is my primary news source.
This is only because I don't watch TV, at all. I only trowel around FB to get updates from friends and family, and if anything gets posted on /. that's even remotely sketchy, there are 30 keyboard warriors ready to pounce on the subject to debunk it....And that one AC who always spouts racial slurs.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
We never had good news before so what is the difference?
Sure we have. We've also had crappy news before. It's trivial to point out examples of news done well over the last 100 years. It's even easier to point of examples of it being done badly.
Sure back in the 1950-1990 we had our "trusted" news on TV. However they tried to cover a Whole days of activity around the world in 1 hour. The first half covering Local and State News, the second half World and National News. So much of the coverage didn't spend more than a few minutes on the topic.
That's was the state of affairs basically until around the the late 1980s to early 1990s for television news. The first big change was CNN and the 24 hour news cycle. The second was the internet (specifically the web) in the 1990s.
The News Papers had much more depth to them. However during newspapers popularity there was a much lower literacy rate, so a good portion of the population couldn't fully read them, and just read what they could. So the headlines. Which is much shorter than a Twitter post.
Literacy rates have been rather high for well over a century in the US, particularly for white americans. Literacy in the 1950s was well above 90%. The percentage of the population that couldn't read a newspaper in the US hasn't been over 10% since before 1910.
While it may because of more polarization, but it is also because people are getting exposed to different ideas thus need to make their decisions from more data.
The evidence seems to show people doing exactly the opposite. People are now able to seek out niche news sources that support their already existing world view and disregarding contrary view points regardless of their validity.
The Media liked JFK, so his indiscretions were ignored. The Media didn't like Nixon so he was kicked out of office.
Must be nice to have such a simplistic world view. Nixon getting kicked out of office had a LOT more to it than whether "The Media" liked him or not. Saying something like that is the sort of idiotic sound bite we get from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. Sounds good to people who want it to be true even though it's complete nonsense in reality.
What worries me more than social media becoming the primary source, is the idea that we should only read be interested in things we are already interested in.
We're in a period of strongly polarized opinions where the idea of political discourse seems to be that you and me sit alone on our respective mountaintops and yell at each other. It bloody important to read news that doesn't fit your existing opinions or interests, how else will you ever question them? Or get new ones?
I try to make a point of reading news sometimes from sources who's political alignment I clearly disagree with. It's annoying and refreshing (and allows me to smugly roll my eyes at the world occasionally). And just once every blue moon, I actually change my opinion or discover something interesting. In an ever more complex reality, we need more viewpoints, not fewer, and I'm worried that algorithmic filtering of news feels like a boon but is actually really detrimental to us all.
Once RNN reaches a point of being able to validate sources and use human comment input from social authorities (individuals with high reputation for wisdom, education and intellect) then people will gravitate more. Trust in the major networks has declined over the years. http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
If you read it like this:
"People is paying more attention to this person that that one in order to know more news."
The point is that people is swallowing whatever they are said, no matter who is those who speak.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I use to enjoy the news because it was a good litmus test to determine how genuinely informed an individual was. These days libtards have become to openly hostile they demand the public gets it from one Policically Correct source and will bully anyone who also doesn't drink from the same poisoned well. That is why I believe there's a genuine rise in informed readers turning to social media and more importantly the comment section of articles in order to get the objective opinions and angles which stimulate the silent majority of educated individuals. Naturally it doesn't always work, like terrible sites which use forms of self moderation and allow the mob to dictate what can be seen or not via broken voting systems but those formats are slowly going the way of the Dodo thankfully.
When one considers the blank stares received when talking to this age group about world events, how those events may affect them or the history of the event, this is not surprising.
Instead of getting a much more full and complete picture of the event they get a snippet devoid of content. All they hear/read is, "White guy found with child porn" or "Catholic priest rapes young boy", with no understanding of how long this has been going on, what happened to the victim or the punishment of the criminal.
Remember when the protestors were outside Trump's speech in CA and some right-wing tabloid put up a picture of a woman bleeding from the head, claiming this is what the protestor's did to her?
The fact was it a picture from Ash vs. Evil and it was Samara Weaving in full blown horror makeup.
But that's not what they saw. They saw only a woman beaten by Trump protestors when the reality was much different but because they only use social media for "news", the facts of the situation will most likely never be known to them.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nowadays, liberals get their news from comedians like Maher or Colbert, while conservatives get their news from another type of entertainers, people like O'Reilly or Limbaugh. Eiher way the information goes through heavily biased lens.
So what's wrong with if younger people choose Facebook instead? Sure just like on TV (and even Netflix now with Chelsea Handler) the liberal point of view is more present; as an example, bashing Trump counts as news. But information also gets filtered by your connections/friends Likes so it all balances out anyways.
lucm, indeed.
In the good old bad old days of printed newspapers, people also only read the papers that supported their preconceived notions. There is nothing new under the Sun, or the Times, or the Guardian...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Tumblr feminists are, for the most part, mentally ill. All you can do is feel sorry for them and hope they get the help they need.
Well thank Providence they aren't frittering their time away watching television all day.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
How many news stories by the supposedly professional news gatherers are festooned with copies of tweets by some random joe? Many stories are 80-90% Twitter comments.
Useless.
Social Media hasn't taken over the News Media, the News Medaia is freely giving itself over to Social Media.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The report also suggests users are noticing the original news brand behind social media content less than half of the time
What, the Associated Press?
Ironically traditional media's news bubbles are why I go to social media INSTEAD of traditional News outlets (TV, Papers, magazines), though I prefer Slashdot, Reddit, and even Google News to Facebook, Twitter, et al.
Not too long ago some local high school student misjudged a pedestrian's velocity at a crosswalk, didn't see how fast she was running, the pedestrian assumed she had right of way, there was an accident, it ended badly. The paper couldn't print enough times how the kid had smoked pot the day before. The judge in the case declared his pot-smoking irrelevant, but that didn't stop the papers from enthusiastically discussing it in every single story! Meanwhile a drunk local politician runs a stop sign, totals two cars, puts a bunch of people in the hospital, and all the paper will say is "He was unable to come to a full stop at the intersection." The bias here is just unreal!
Right now there's a big deal in all the traditional media about the heroin epidemic. It wasn't all that many months ago the stories were about arresting doctors who dared to prescribe oxycodone. Traditional News won't talk about the connection, but on social media it's obvious as hell that folks with chronic pain migrated from oxycodone to heroin, and that our politicians are killing them by the tens if not hundreds of thousands to manufacture a crises they can respond to. Very different perspectives there!
It's nothing new under the sun. Some years back our politicians tried to raise the local sales tax. The papers all had a half-page editorial on their front page extolling the virtues of voting for the tax hike. Every news broadcast spent all their time discussing the great benefits of this tax hike! But every local businessman I talked to had a plan for moving out of the area if the tax hike passed. They simply couldn't compete, they couldn't stay in business with the new tax. Their only option was to move across the county line. Not surprisingly, the referendum failed.
Tell me, you're reading this on Slashdot, how many times has Microsoft gotten great press in traditional media extolling the wonderful benefits of Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, the new UI, etc? How many times have you visited Slashdot for a completely different firsthand perspective? I remember when WinXP came out, and Microsoft reps visited campus claiming how WinXP was now so stable it could go a whole week between bluescreens. And we all laughed at them because we were using Linux and measured uptime in years!
How many times have you had firsthand knowledge of a news story? Has traditional media EVER gotten it right? Even ONCE?
Seems like traditional media is just the ultra-rich, who own traditional media, using it to selectively foist stories upon us that support their perspectives and their business interests, largely at our expense!
That is one huge summary and a stupid way to put it. Such and such percent of such and such as. Fuck you do you think we are all stupid?
Earning your trust to later betray you is what you get with any government institution and they are the smith and wesson backbone of Facebook.
The summary should have been:
With Facebook profiling you and sharing data with literally all governments in real time via a network of spy networks and backstabbing moles, you don't have to wait until the 10:00 news to be bullshitted.
BeauHD take the dick out of your ass before you post stories ok thanks.
Being a father of three kids - this is spot on. They've moved to Internet news outlets and social media. For us as parents - it becomes more and more important to teach critical thinking.
Who is the source, what are the credentials of that source and who pays them.
Even in regular magazines and media, they are slipping in adds subtly deemed as news, at the bottom you may spot the "advertisement" in a very small font.
I'm 53 years old and have seen a lot of rot in journalism. Journalism is going through a serious identity crisis the last twenty years. Due to very biased influences infiltrating the news sources such as newspapers and broadcast news, very rarely are we getting the whole story and many stories deemed important are getting suppressed. I look for a healthy balance of all views (Faux News does NOT count). I took a very interesting college course that highlighted the manipulation of journalism, especially in broadcast TV.
I ceased watching broadcast news since 2000. They only report part of the story and they emphasize anything that can be sensationalized in a visual context. I also got tired of ads for movies and TV shows disguised as "news". The bias is far worse today as the power of reporting is too concentrated in too few hands.
Newspapers are getting more biased. It doesn't help that many areas only have one local newspapers when fifty years ago there were multiple resources. That concentrated the source of news into one place which was exploited when powerful interests infiltrated a central source and exerted their influence. I live in a small community and we actually have two newspapers - one has a healthy balance while the other is blatantly biased. Many times both have the same story, but the biased one omits some text that changes the story. I don't like that manipulation and deception.
Having abandoned TV and largely print news, that leaves the internet. But many news websites are NOT journalism, they are tabloids disguised as news outlets. I stopped visiting some legitimate news sources because the ad content is too dense or too disruptive. The decent news outlets are few and far between and it really takes some cherry picking to find them. The bright side of legitimate news websites is that as more people have abandoned the biased print media they are showing signs of collapsing, which may finally break the cycle of power concentrated into too few hands.
FB is hardly a beacon of journalistic integrity. I ignore the trending section. Too many news stories in my feed are blatantly false or biased. When a headline uses tabloid catch-phrases like "This is HUGE!" I get really p!ssed for them wasting my time. I make it a point to do fact checking before passing on a story on my timeline, and even then I seldom do that more than once a month if at all. I block many of these because my FB friends keep passing around the junk and don't take the effort to check the source. I block some of my friends from my feed because they spout some really offensive stuff.
A lot of the junk tabloid websites bring up pop-under ads that can be potential malware if I close them (telltale sign "Are you sure you really want to close this?"), so I have to pull the internet and use Activity Monitor (I'm on a Mac) to safely force the application to close. Any tabloid that spreads malware really grinds my gears so I maintain a list of websites to avoid.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
The truth about Nixon is that he was living in an age with basically a single-source media - Television. The TV news people weren't letting the story go, so he had to go.
The Watergate story was broken by the Washington Post NEWSPAPER. If you think TV was the only news source in 1972-73 then you are completely clueless. Newspapers, magazine, TV, and radio were all substantial parts of the media in the early 1970s.
This is disturbing and saddens me greatly, given facebook, twitter and reddit are are censoring and oppressing these days...
FAIL GENERATION.
how about one that implies some kind of fixed morality to the world that justified taking Nixon out while leaving Hillary Clinton free, considering they both did pretty much the same thing.
Exactly when did Hillary Clinton wiretap the Democratic Party Headquarters? When did she order the CIA to block the FBI's investigation? When did Hillary force the Attorney General and Deputies to resign? When did Hillary authorize the White House to pay blackmail payments?
Hillary hasn't even come close to the lack of ethics shown by the Nixon administration. If you think otherwise you don't understand the Watergate scandal well enough.
When I look at Facebook, there's basically no content. I would be starving for information if that's how I got it. I don't mean that it's biased, or it's lame, I mean it's anemic and an insignificant trickle. All I see on Facebook are people talking about how they spent their day, where they shop, and (from certain people) a nonstop barrage of "political" flames.
I'm certainly not surprised that TV is overtaken, but I would think the web would be the crushing force, not a empty game-like non-newsy niche within the web.
How can anyone get by using something like Facebook to find out what's going on? It seems you would miss well over 99% of everything. I totally don't get it.
...the one news source that's worse than television news. Even Fox News usually refrains from making shit up (i.e. they take real events but report them incorrectly), but Facebook is littered with outright hoaxes.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And there was no News in (of) The World, so they stopped publication.
...stuff gets wet when it rains.
Facebook, like mainstream media is controlled by Jews and used to spread their lies and propaganda. Same bullshit, different platform.
Nixon wasn't impeached or even accused of 'condoning' or ordering a break-in at the Watergate. Even his worst enemies at the time didn't accuse him of that, that would have been stupid. No, his crime was covering up the break-in and then hiding the evidence, specifically the White House taping system. Sound familiar?
The recent admissions by Facebook and Twitter for politically slanting/altering their feeds combined with the average idiot's inability to obtain information from multiple sources indicates one of the most dangerous times for this and many other countries.
Even worse, the attention-mongering media that can't be trusted either now uses the most outrageous social media posts to create controversial news stories and attract viewers/listeners/clicks.
The real failure is in the system of education. Few people are taught to view all sources of media rather than surround themselves with a conglomerate echo chamber of someone else's view of the world. I have even less faith that there will be any meaningful change to alleviate that problem either.
Main stream media has been known to be politically spin either left or right and not be unbiased in their reporting. At least in social media, you can get individuals ideas on an event over scripted political stuff.
God spoke to me
Social Media Overtakes Television As Young People's Main Source of Propaganda, Says Report
Well, one source of fake news and false information is just as good as another...
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
I see two big, big problems here:
1. People getting their news from social media services that are not even nominally bound by any sort of journalistic integrity. Amidst allegations of liberal favoritism, Facebook recently said that, in addition to trending topics and modest human curation which is supposed to be unbiased and minimal, news feed content derives from algorithmically cherry-picked stories; said cherry-picking is conducted with the goal of keeping the user engaged and/or happy [citation needed, I know -- I can't find it]. Unless the user is a psychopath, they're unlikely to get a very complete picture of current events if they only see news stories that are pleasantly interesting. Facebook is neat, but the content it displays to users is unabashedly influenced by what is popular and/or fun, and therefore not a reliable (complete) news source. That said, since mass media is largely fueled by ad revenue and/or ratings systems, even the most reputable sources are prone to sensationalism (this is obviously not new), which segues nicely into the next point...
2. People aren't checking citations. Regardless of where you get your news, knowing where a story came from is critical: in the absence of some sort of magically unbiased, 100% honest and trustworthy news outlet (I'm waiting for Newsbot AI, programmed by a different and very dispassionate AI to remove human bias entirely), the best we can do as readers is to compare multiple (ideally oppositely biased) news sources. If you ignore the citations, not only are you devaluing the very notion of citation (and, by extension, journalism), but you're also missing the particular shaker of salt you probably should be taking a given story with.
The quality of news reporting from traditional sources has been in decline for many years. So called journalists will publish press releases as news, with no fact checks or any other basic journalism. The traditional players will present advertisements as news which is intentionally deceptive and a breach of trust with their readers or viewers. The less dishonest will at least note in the heading that it is a sponsored article. Political bias is another problem with factual reporting of news.
If you can't trust the traditional news organisations, you might as well get the news from whatever some random person posts on the internet. There are some good blogs, youtube channels and forums for technical news that the mainstream media has never been good with.
Brawndo.
President Camacho: Now I understand everyone's shit's emotional right now. But I've got a 3 point plan that's going to fix EVERYTHING.
Congressman #1: Break it down, Camacho!
President Camacho: Number 1: We've got this guy Not Sure. Number 2: He's got a higher IQ than ANY MAN ALIVE. and Number 3: He's going to fix EVERYTHING.
Who knew "Idiocracy" was actually a road map for the future of civilization?
I see no one suggesting reading printed newspapers. They used to be the reference for serious journalism, not TV, not social media. That was not so long ago. The Economist is one of the rare remaining well researched journal. Compare that to ... Facebook video comments, announced as our next cognitive stage. Good luck making informed decisions about your life, health, family and education. We will vote for the President we deserve.