The first way humans could share news was through word of mouth, but if anyone has had the experience of telling a story so many times that it became exaggerated out of proportion, they would agree that word of
mouth is not a reliable source. With the invention of the printing press, and the television following afterwards, news companies built their business model on providing factual and reliable information. In the 21st century, social media has brought us back to our roots of word-of-mouth news sharing, but at a massive scale. In 2024, 25% of U.S. adults often get their news from social media, and another 29% “sometimes” do, according to the Pew Research Center.
During the recent 2024 election, misinformation was worse than it has been in the previous election years according to The American Psychological Association (APA). “We haven’t seen anything like this in our postwar modern political reality,” Howard Lavine, a political psychologist at the University of Minnesota said. Social media plays a role in this trend because of its lack of fact checkers, all the while giving misinformation a platform to become viral, according to the APA.
The spread of misinformation on social media has impacted the public deception of trustworthy mainstream news organizations. “Fake news can also discredit the press directly by accusing them of bias, complicity, and incompetence – or indirectly by contradicting a range of claims made by mainstream media. What is more, the very existence of online misinformation resembling a journalistic product can diminish the
credibility of legitimate news,” according to Misinformation Review by Ognyanova et al.
X, formally Twitter, has been a main catalyst for this misinformation spread. On an interview at PBS NewsHour, Chris Bail, Founding director of Duke Polarization Lab, states: “When we look at people who are highly politically active on, we find that about 70% of the content about politics is generated by just 6% of people, and those 6% of people are disproportionately very liberal or very conservative.” While this minority
of very polarized people are not necessarily posting misinformation, Misinformation Review, posted by Harvard Kennedy school, states that 14% of people in a 2022 U.S. survey claim that they would knowingly repost misinformation on social media. They found that this 14% of people were more likely to have very polarized and extreme political views.
To stay away from the misinformation of social media, senior Skylar Collins gets her news from sources such as FactCheck.org and NPR news because she believes they are neutral and reputable.
Social media plays a large role in the spread of misinformation, “Social media typically lacks the oversight and safeguards of legacy media to prevent and correct false claims. Its algorithms and peer-to-peer sharing model are a perfect setup for misinformation to be shared widely, especially within the echo chambers that form online,” according to the APA.
The spread of misinformation has multiple implications for the future. One adverse effect is that companies might be financially incentivized to promote the spread of misinformation. “Right now, there is an incentive to spread fake news. It is profitable to do so, profit made by creating an article that causes enough outrage that advertising money will follow,” said Amber Case in an article from the Pew Research Center.
Meta, following in the footsteps of X, has recently announced that they will be ending third party fact checking on Facebook and Instagram to move to a, “community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes,”
according to NBC news. Mark Zuckerberg claims these changes have been made to prevent users from being wrongly censored due to mistakes in the fact checking algorithm, but it could also allow the spread of more misinformation.
As long as social media companies such as X and Meta take steps that allow the spread of misinformation, it comes does the individual to get news from trustworthy, neutral sources, and be skeptical of things read on social media.
