Did you know that…“FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE.”
With politics being a hot topic right now, Facebook is filled with political articles and opinions from anyone and everyone. If people today are not watching television or listening to the news on the radio, where are they getting it from?
Most of the current generation are not turning on the television to channel 2 and watching the morning and evening news like it used to be in the past.
As of 2016, six in 10 Americans use social media to access their news. That is around 62 percent of the population in the United States alone. Meanwhile, 44 percent of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook.
Not everyone uses the same sources for news and because of this, it is important to not make blanketed rules or opinions. Brian Flynn, 21-year-old junior at Rutgers University studying finance, shared how he gets his news.
“I try to get my news from news aggregators such as Reddit. I love it so much because it links you to the direct source. Facebook to me seems to be more of a passive way of getting news and there doesn’t seem to be a way to fact check easily,” Flynn said.
For some, Facebook is seen as a source to get breaking news right away.
“It [Facebook] has evolved into breaking news. I find it out on Facebook before anywhere else at this point. But I do think it can be biased, more so than even watching the news or reading the newspaper,” biology professor, Dr. Emily Basile, said.
People may think that because it is on the internet, it must be true but this is not always the case.
Look at the first sentence in this article: “FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE”. This is a completely false headline that was used for an anti-Hillary article a few weeks ago.
Continuing on with the point that a person cannot believe everything on social media, a few days prior to the election, a man by the name of James Alafantis had an article written about him and the pizza place he owns called Comet Ping Pong. There were terrible rumors and lies spread all over social media about how children were being used as sex slaves as part of a child-abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton.
Due to the fact people will believe almost anything and everything they see online, death threats and angry messages were sent to both Alafanits and most of his employees.
“From this insane, fabricated conspiracy theory, we’ve come under constant assault,” Alafantis said.
On Dec. 5, a man by the name of Edgar M. Welch read the article that was just previously mentioned about the pizzeria. He decided to check it out himself. Once Welch arrived at the pizzeria, the police said, he fired from an assault-like AR-15 rifle in response to what he read online. Luckily nobody was hurt.
Hypothesis of Philipp Müller, Pascal Schneiders and Svenja Schafer from their article ‘Appetizer or main dish? Explaining the use of Facebook news posts as a substitute for other news sources’ consists of, “The feeling of being well-informed through news posts on Facebook promotes the use of Facebook as a substitute for other news sources.”
Collecting information of what is going on the world from social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on is not necessarily good or bad.
On Twitter, a poll asked the question: What is your main news source? The options included Facebook, Twitter, television and radio.
As of the most recent results, 25 percent of the people who responded selected Facebook, a greater number of 75 percent selected Twitter.
As previously stated, the idea of people using social media sites such as Facebook as their main source for news is not necessarily good or bad, but in fact quite interesting.
