Negative Effects Of Social Media On Journalism

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Social Media and the Negative Effects it has on Journalism

Since technology is growing rapidly people turn to social media more than ever to get their information. Whether it is from trending stories on Facebook or Twitter hashtags, social media has the power to leak this information right away. Once this information is posted within seconds most of the world has already seen it. This can be quite crazy to wrap your head around, but it has become a major problem for journalists. Two stories that help to explain these issues are The New York Times article “Falling for the Dylann Roof hoax and Sunil Tripathi Boston Marathon bombing accusations.
Dylann Roof as many know was the suspected Charleston church shooter on June 17, 2015. “As soon as …show more content…

This is where ethical problems occurred. Within the code of journalism ethics it states that a journalist should “test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error (SPJ, 1996).” This means that journalist must try to figure out the truth behind their facts before publishing their information for all to see. In this case they did not do that breaking an ethical code of journalism. In this article it states that “Robles the journalist who covered the story was tricked by a couple of teenagers who took advantage of the media’s hunger for new information about the shooter and our reliance on Facebook as a communication tool (Tolan, 2015).” Also during a Skype interview with Fusion Wareing stated, “our ultimate goal of this was to see if a reporter would publish something that was completely untrue (Tolan, …show more content…

During this tragic event television stations were down and no one truly knew what was going on in Boston. We live in a world today that when we are looking for information we turn to social media as a gateway to the news. At the time no one knew exactly who committed this attack, but there were accusations that went around. One of the people accused was Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who went missing in March of 2015. “Amateur internet sleuths declared the two men were one and the same, even prompting some journalists (including Digg 's Ross Newman, Politico 's Dylan Byers, Newsweek 's Brian Ries, NBC 'sLuke Russert, and Buzzfeed 's Andrew Kaczynski) to spread word of Tripathi 's possible guilt (Lee, 2015).” Social media took over this story causing more problems for the Tripathi family during this time of panic. “As the policed pursued the two suspects on a fiery chase through the Boston area, the rumor spread, leading news vans to stake out the Tripathis’s family home and reporters to make dozens of calls to the Tripathi family’s cellphones (Bidgood,

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