Social Media Credibility

Interest and curiosity are human nature and people will always turn to sources of information to fulfill these needs. However, sometimes not all those sources are reliable. As the years pass by; data being more accessible, regardless of whether it is through word of mouth or conventional and mainstream media. Data brings a new era of information that gives people the opportunity to develop to a network full of information and knowledge, which they can use to their advantage and strengthen their future careers. Having simple and easy access to all this information is important; it empowers people to understand and learn about the world and their surroundings. It encourages them to be critical thinkers and productive workers, to make informed

decisions about their life and community. However, this is not the case all time; data is not always available in the most filtered form and sometimes people don’t know which to take and to discard. Not all information comes from reliable sources; so people fall can into deceptive traps and lies. Social Medias do not help deal with fake news online because they thrive off “juicy” rumours and it provides more content and it brings clicks.
Facebook and Twitter cannot contain these false stories online because they have already grown too big and there is already too much of it online.

If big news outlets like Twitter and Facebook do deal with this problem so well, why is there so much false news on the internet? Media credibility plays a huge role in social networking as most people look to major outlets such as Twitter and Facebook for their daily news and drama. However, it poses a question, to what level is that information true? Studies show that around 56% of the information is true online, and most of this information is coming from established sites and government sites, whereas sites posted by individuals are about 90% of the time false. Due to this new era of digital media, people are turning to broadcast media and relying on them for their daily news. If this is mostly based on lies or not entirely accurate news, how much does it affect media credibility? An example of this is the bombing during the Boston Marathon. April 15, 2013; on this day, a tragedy occurred during a marathon at the finishing line in the city of Boston. Two bombs exploded within minutes of each other, resulting in a nationwide crisis and caused a media frenzy where social and mainstream media fed off each other with speculations and rumours. Once again, social media proved to be its own undoing where people took this legitimate news. Similarly to this, just a week later, a tweet from a Twitter account perceived to be trustworthy

mentioned an attack on the White House and president Obama being injured. This caused a huge panic and later, turned out to be a hoax. This had big effects as it had negative implications on the citizens and especially on the U.S stock market; the Dow Jones dropped by 143 points but later, regained its status.
Rumours, especially “juicy” and “hot” topics, seem to spread very fast. This leads to a chain of continuous rumours. One second, a Twitter post has only 3 retweets, the next, everyone seems to have heard about it. This phenomenon is especially prevalent on social media. Click bait is cleverly titled rumours about just anything you can imagine that spreads like a wildfire despite the how reliable it is. The University of Saarland found that these types of rumours tend to spread quicker on social networks rather than random networks. Mainstream Medias are optimized or designed in some partial way to facilitate the information out there or have these types of stories pop up on your news feed. An example of this can be seen on Facebook and Twitter, both of these sites have a ‘Trending’ bar which lets you see what is currently popular and. It is found that often, these claims are false. Thus, supporting the claim that most social networking sites do not stop this, but rather help it. One of the reasons this phenomenon spreads at such a high rate is that it can be shared with many people at once; this causes a chain of information travelling from person to person. True rumours tend to be spread more than false ones. A study found that on Facebook, 63% of information is false or not entirely true while only a minimal 9% is true. To make matters worse, debunking false information proves to be a quite difficult task. I believe this is due to an influx of this running on social media; there are 1.2 million terabytes of information on there, so to filter that, seems to be hard.
Facebook’s algorithms cause fake news stories to spread because it takes the posts with more likes and shares and makes them more popular. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have come under heavy scrutiny from the media for not taking responsibility but rather fuelling the fire. Facebook has basically been built to encourage engagement on the site and there is no better way to do so than to have groundbreaking news. More clicks mean more money for them, Facebook doesn’t directly make money from this but when you have 1.8 billion logging on every month, you do profit. It is so easy for these sites and malicious rumours to spread; once it gets onto the site, there’s little you can do to stop it. Facebook is the main driver for these websites’ success; people can buy and create these accounts just to drop a link that can lead to bigger problems. Facebook’s algorithm has also been criticized for promoting stories which have many likes and shares. When there is enough engagement and talk about a story, more people share and like it and the truth slowly becomes less and less important. Now it gets more ominous than this when bots or programs mimic people and go on posts, it engages more people. Although Facebook has done a good job of stopping these bots by adding extra security measures to prove someone’s humanity. Now Facebook has tried to stop these by detecting them easier and more effectively, this can fall into many groups; the false information is being classified and put into groups. They have also had their users come into help by making it easier to report. They have also implemented a new system to label stories and they have begun to use third party verifications that are fact checking based organizations to check an article’s validity. The algorithms of these social medias have invited these stories to spread all around.
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are double-edged weapons.

One side brings society many social benefits and leaves positive imprints beyond measure on our lives; the other side leads you to a world full of deceptive traps and lies set out by people for their profits; this can have monumental effects on innocent people’s lives and workplace. Although Facebook has started to crack down and detect these malicious lies, there is still a long time to go. We must learn to utilize these sites as they can prove to be an invaluable asset to our society; we must also learn that not everything we read or see online is highly accurate. The algorithms placed on these sites put them at blame because it takes the “hot” topics and makes them popular, when a high percentage of them are rumours or completely

false.