Are facts worth your time?

These days fake news is everywhere and people keep consuming it due to how quickly it is able to spread across social media

For decades, the news that we consumed was controlled by major news outlets like BBC and ITV. However, in the last few years this has changed due to the sudden rise in popularity of social media. Now, there is a seemingly endless amount of information being spread all over the internet everyday. This may be great for the future of the media industry as a whole, but it also may be just as, if not even more, terrible for the world.

Obviously, this makes our ability to view and see the news a lot more convenient. Instead of having to wait all day to see the information that you want to hear about show up on TV, now you just have to make a quick Google search and you are immedi- ately presented with all the news and information that you need. This is incredible at saving us time, but also is equally as good at giving us freedom. Before the recent rise of social media, the news industry was very controlled and restricted. The only ways that you could have previously viewed the news was by reading a newspaper, watching TV or listening to the radio. All these options could be easily controlled by the big corporations as they were the ones that were broadcasting and funding the information that was being shown. This meant that you had to trust these businesses to accurately give you your news, because you didn’t have any other option.

Newspapers often share political biases, whether they are a broadsheet or a tabloid, so they could have very easily been exploited to influence your opinions by only showing you the information that they want you to see. Now, however, social media has given the opportunities to all the small news outlets and journalists to get their information and stories out there for the world to see. This has made it a lot harder for these major companies to get away with hiding information that they don’t want you to see because of how easy it has now become to view all the information surrounding a particular story.

As well as this, people have more opportunities than ever to make a serious career in the news and journalism industry.

There are a huge variety of sites that give different types of news, which has allowed people to be more specific with the type of news that they produce. This means that more time and effort can be put into a particular subject and story, which will allow for more detailed and better put together news. Although you have more opportunities to work at news companies, you can just as easily start producing and publishing your own news independently. All you need to do is gather any research you need from Google and begin to post your articles and stories on your social media pages. However this can also lead to the biggest issue with the modern way we consume our news.

Due to anyone being able to post news on social media, this has led to a huge amount of misinformation being spread around the internet. This is the result of a few reasons.

One major reason why this is happening so much and so quickly is because of our decreasing attention spans. According to the book “Attention Span: A Ground-breaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” by Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, the average attention span in 2004 was roughly 2 and a half minutes, but now it has dropped to only 47 seconds. This is a serious issue for the news industry as the public no longer has the patience to wait for any accurate information. These days people care more about how quickly someone is able to produce news than how accurate it may be. Unfortunately, fact checking information takes time, so by the time the real stories get out there, it’s too late, as the fake or false versions have already spread and gotten the attention of the public.

Despite having the freedom to, a lot of people won’t want to go and do their own research into a particular story to see if the information is false or not. This has led to anyone now easily being able to spread fake news as long as they are quick to produce it and know how to market themselves.

The scariest part is that social media is now the main source for most people’s news. Every year newspapers and TV are becoming less and less popular in favour of social media. From a poll I conducted, 9 out of 10 people get most, if not all, of their news from social media. Therefore, most people can be easily exposed to fake news on a daily basis and there isn’t much that can be done about it. Social media is used by so many people that it’s impossible to keep track of what everyone is posting. You can’t just have every post be fact checked for accurate information, which is what allows fake news to be shared so easily and so much in such a short amount of time. The social media companies can’t spend their time keeping up to date on all the latest news to stop the false news from being shared, which makes it very difficult to prevent fake news.

And it’s not like the big news outlets are able to do much about it either. They might be able to always put out the right and accurate information, but at the end of the day, people will want speed and efficiency over quality and accuracy. People don’t have the time to waste waiting for the correct news anymore, so as long as the news is quick to show up, they will take an interest in that over traditional news.

This is a problem that doesn’t seem like it is going to be stopped or slowed anytime soon due to how large social media is and how much of an impact it has on our day to day lives. The only thing that we can do is hope that other people take the time to fact check themselves before spreading misinformation, but unfortunately, that just doesn’t seem very likely.