Fake News Social Media and Noise
Rumours and Social Media
This is a 50 minute Univeristy level presentation analysising the Quality of Social Media news reporting.
Personally I dont take as Gospel any Twitter or Social Media based information source including Facebook.
And Why?
Mainly because the pedigree of the information posted is questionable. It may be related from direct Facebook friends, but the information passed to them can be a chain of cumulative distortions. And most people I know dont fact check every article before they post.
Of course, Marcus and Agata always attempt to fact check every single article Blog Posted, G+ posted or sent to Facebook. All that takes time of course, a lot of time.
And we know for sure that many friends continue to tell us they have no time in their busy lives so to imagine that they are fact checking any Facebook re-post, well this would not be realistic.
Quality Newspapers
- Staffed with journalists
- The journalist has a job to report the news, not an unpaid hobby
- Quality Media has decades of experience, infrastructure and physical and digital presence
- With acknowledged Political Bias but not to the point of blatantly making up whole news articles
- Of course some established news sources are not at the cutting edge of Social Journalism, they may step back from the new frontiers of reporting techniques, but they do have a great Internet presence and a reputation to maintain.
To me quality journalism, example: BBC, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal et al are accountable. By that I mean if they continue to publish articles that are consistently found to be inaccurate or inconsistent over time I begin to distrust them.
Compared them to an army of Tweets or information passed on by single and usually unknown individuals on the Internet, often unverifiable.
I would further say that I discount and discard any wild accusation about Journalistic Credibility even from oh, perhaps the President of the United States, when it is made in an unprofessional, cavalier manner, without any shred of evidence. To me this is similar to he behaviour of the playground bully mixed in with the spoilt child.
In summary, do watch the above video. And if you want a place to get a reasonable news summary then I recommend
news.google.com
This is customisable so you can include your preferred quality newspaper sources.
download file now