I see it more as The Atlantic knowing who their paying audience is. It's definitely not the teens, probably their parents who also don't understand them and are looking for any clue.
Sad to see that for the new generation, "news" is equivalent to shitty Instagram pictures.
It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network.
> “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us information,” Dann said. “The fact that we’re all posting about these things means we all have to do research and it’s a lot of people completing these things together, not just one person, which makes us trust it more.”
Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
Where did you see that young people think flop accounts are news? The article is about discussing issues on instagram, there is no mention of news.
Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc. Previous generations couldn't do that so easily. So a complete distrust of news shouldn't be surprising.. they aren't really very trustworthy in the first place.
These teens don't need to trust the instagram accounts, which is the whole point. The account just makes a post to bring up a discussion point, whether or not that point is fact-checked is irrelevant. (Its mostly gossip with political/moral/idealogical/etc angles anyway)/
> All the while, an increasing number of teens are turning to these types of accounts for news, seeing them as more reliable and trustworthy than traditional media.
It says it right there in the article.
My point is that conventional news can be biased, but they're much harder to bias than this nonsense. Conventional news would pretty much require the entire media company to be on your side, which would require a lot of money. This would only require a few fake accounts to skew, at maybe 1% the cost of what it takes to skew conventional news.
Could you elaborate? How is my definition of bias incorrect? All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda.
I find it very worrying that people want to force young people who are learning to form their own opinion to choose "correctly". For whatever value of correctly.
By contrast, what these kids are doing, trying to pressure and misinform each other, is exactly what I'd want them to do : they're learning. Maybe, God forbid, they'll learn how that works and when it's being done to them.
And that, I'm sure, a decent fraction of them will disagree with you ... that's a very good thing indeed.
same inquiry could be made to ask you if you thought there were real people behind the boards/chans u were on as a kid as opposed to adult scammers or whatever. kids grow up on the internet like how we did but now the tables turned and they either figure it out or not its up to them
Plus ... when it comes to "better" information sources. There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. People will need to learn to deal with them, protecting them is not possible. As if that's not bad enough, any attempts to protect them simply creates better tools for people to feed bad information to more people, and might result in outright censorship (if it hasn't already)
> There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists.
This is a much-underestimated factor that didn't exist, on that scale, previously.
When I was hanging out in chat groups in the late 90's I didn't have to worry about my conversational partner having, financially motivated and sinister, motives to change my opinions about certain topics.
Except for straight up scams, but nobody had a vested financial interest in "convincing" me about something.
These days there's a whole industry built around exactly that (social media marketing), the web is full of dishonest information players, even on a governmental level, on literally all sides. This isn't even that new, it's a development that the US military caught on years ago [0].
I find it more worrying that anyone would want to support this kind of learning. These young people are not being educated on how to identify misinformation; rather, they're being indoctrinated with values that encourage virtue signaling or worse, trolling.
Living inside a bubble of criticism and misinformation doesn't lead one to immediately question and then reform the system. More often, people choose to adapt to their environment which only perpetuates the existing infrastructure.
Instead of pointlessly debating each other on this app, a platform designed to capture attention and manipulate emotions, these people should take time to research and then carefully write an essay. Once they are satisfied with their opinions, they could share their thesis with the public and request contestation.
If we simply continue with this twitter/facebook/instagram trend of summarizing our most important debates in 150 words or less in a brief amount of time, we're only going to become less educated and more vulnerable to coercion.
Unfortunately, I think that before society really figures this out there’s going to be at least one “lost” generation, that will be seriously hurt or screwed up and by such groupthink.
> Instead of pointlessly debating each other on this app, a platform designed to capture attention and manipulate emotions
Someone probably write this same thing about news papers when they were a recent invention. Television also.
> these people should take time to research and then carefully write an essay. Once they are satisfied with their opinions, they could share their thesis with the public and request contestation.
More people than ever before are now university educated, or presently attending university. That’s got to help counteract the misinformation trend.
> Someone probably write this same thing about news papers when they were a recent invention. Television also.
Well, I don't think television or the news paper is a good place to debate either. They do however give people more than 30 seconds to think about their responses.
> Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc.
When is the last time you've bought a physical newspaper?
They are often lined up in such a way that you can compare headlines of several publications without even touching any of them.
And if that's actually the reason, then why should only kids be privy to this? None of this is actually that new, imho it's a very similar dynamic to that whole "MSM is fake-news, that's why I get all my news from Facebook groups" trend.
But instead of Facebook (which is where by now only "old people" hang out), these kids use Instagram, which happens to be the social media platform of choice for their range of age because it's literally a Facebook product rebranded to do exactly that: Appeal to a younger audience.
> Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network.
I beg to differ. I learn more viewpoints on HN than on media. CNN has reliably demonstrated systematically adding a spin to all their reporting (for example « women are the only victims of donestic violence and no women is guilty of anything », just by skipping the reporting on male victims), so much that Americans trust CNN lower than congress. At that point a mix of random viewpoints from Instagram, is way better than one media who claims to deliver the truth and reliably doesn’t.
If anything, news media need to seriously stop this nonsense, and at least it should not be possible with simple fact-checking to notice that they are spinning news all the way up to making falsehoods out of individually correct statements.
> ...have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us information
Reminds me of one of the main reasons I enjoy discussions on HN so much.
> ...instead of just depending on one source giving us information... The fact that we’re all posting about these things means we all have to do research
Therein lies the rub - how do you vet the "research" of your peers in content that seems to largely not cite references? My guess is that they are likely to be using the same sources of information without realizing or acknowledging it.
Throwing an hypothesis: since the 50s the drift into youth culture leads to an immature relationship to the world, a distaste with adult lingo because of a lack of habits regarding complexity and abstractions. I think this is a mistake.
> It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news"
I mean they probably are. It’s unlikely these kids are running their Instagram channels as loss leaders with the real goal of selling billion dollar military technology.
Why does it have to be RT and not any other interest group?
Tbh it's kinda pissing me off how these days everybody on the web pretends Russian people and organizations are the only ones using socket-puppets to spread "misinformation", just like Russia is supposedly the only actor that constantly hacks everything and everybody.
It's just reinforcing the current, rather hysteric, narrative that Russia is to blame for everything from Trump getting elected, to Brexit, and even the generally rising "right wing" sentiments.
As somebody outside the Anglo-Saxon sphere, looking at places like Reddit, it feels like people are being riled up for a war, and it seems to be working extremely well.
While it’s more likely they will get more basic facts wrong, and mix up opinion with reporting.
There’s a different type of error distribution.
The baseline issue is that media firms doing boring news are not marginally competitive, against a new cycle driven sensational news channel.
The noisy channel will get more viewers, more ad space and eventually buy out the other channel.
Part of the problem is unbridled efforts to apply psych and marketing research to win market share (a corporate necessity).
And the other part is also an Intellectual malaise in many viewers.
I think we just give it all up and start working for the men with the power. The situation seems unsolvable, and people are pretty much only investing in systems
That propagate this phenomenon.
All news needs to become more boring and fact based - yesterday.
This arms race for attention will not stop. Market competition is a crap system when a common resource is allowed to be exploited - in this case, collective attention.
> It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news".
Given the state of conventional news, can you blame them? Foxnews is just a republican party news organization. And everything else ( CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYTimes, NPR, etc ) are a democratic party news organization.
It is sad that news has become so political and none of it is reliable. It's just one political side lying, exaggerating, clickbaiting and hating the other political side. It's a political/news war and the first casualty of any war is the truth.
Maybe it was always this way and I was just too young and naive to notice.
> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
As long as they don't censor, it won't be an echo chamber. Social media only becomes an echo chamber when the company takes sides. Sadly, google, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc are being forced to take sides with disastrous results. It doesn't help that formerly trusted organizations like the SPLC and ADL have turned extremely biased and unreliable.
The worst part is that news companies are at the forefront of pushing for censoring on the internet. Which creates more echo chambers, which creates more divisions. But I suppose that is good for ratings and that's all that matters to news companies. Not truth, not objectivity. Just ratings.
Given how toxic news media has gotten, it's better than teens stay away from it entirely. How many adults go insane watching CNN, MSNBC or Foxnews? Too many. The news industry has only itself to blame for it's predicament. Nobody trust news for a reason.
I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
Yep, groupthink runs rampant on social media, just as it does on HN and other fora.
This thread will generate the usual boilerplate blathering about "Faux News" and "Wapo" and on and on and on, when the total news output of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WP, and the rest of the outlets that get people all frothing at the mouth and picking up their tribal pitchforks and torches is less than 1% of the actual news published in America on any given day.
The people who seem the most upset by the state of news today are the people who consume only from a few national sources, but never think to pick up their local newspaper where there are actual stories about the actual places they live that affect them in ways they don't even know because they can't be bothered with dead tree editions.
They use a lot of lame echo-chamber excuses about "portability this" and "digital future that" to explain away their laziness. Plus 20- and 30-somethings these days are unwilling to pay 50¢ for some factual information to accompany their $8.00 coffee and their $1,000 phones.
It may be hard for some people to grip, but 99.99999% of the news stories published in an average day have nothing to do with Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. But you'd never know it if the internet is the only way you consume information.
What happens in the White House or Congress or the United Nations or North Korea affects people infinitely less than the new water main going in down the street, or how a local politician is spending their money, or whether it was their neighbor's kid who got killed in that bad rollover crash you saw on your way home from work.
For the record, I subscribe to five newspapers and one magazine. Three of the newspapers are in printed form. Of those, one newspaper is local, the others come by mail from other cities where I have interests. The magazine is also in print form, and comes weekly. The remaining two newspapers are digital. My wife subscribes to an industry journal which arrives in printed form DAILY as a broadsheet, six days a week, and has a supplemental app for breaking news.
The printed articles she pulls from her newspaper and leaves on my desk for me to read are generally a week to 10 days ahead of the internet.
When my newspapers arrive, the first thing I do is pull out the Opinion sections and toss them in the blue bin. America would be better off if newspapers didn't have opinion sections to reinforce all of society's divisiveness. It was OK back when cities had six or seven daily newspapers. But today, it's a disservice to the public.
I also pull out the comics section/page and read that first. If I don't manage to get past that much of a particular paper, it's still time well spent.
I can remember talking politics on message boards as a young teen. I don't think memes necessarily help. Its just a new medium of exchange now that forums are well and truly dead.
That’s literally all traditional news is. One questionable and undoubtedly biased source writes an article. If it’s likely to get attention, then other news stations copy it verbatim. Social media is just an “unpolished” version of this preexisting turd of a setup.
Instructive is the smear campaign against SMTP Creator and IANA head Jon Postel by anonymous "senior government officials" in the months before his death. It was a classic government smear campaign, against someone who did so much, for such low pay, to get the Internet working. He was repaid by the government hounding him in the months before his death. Thankfully John Gilmore held up the torch on all the shady deals going on after he died, even though not much was done.
No, it's not. At least not if you're counting the old papers as traditional.
If you're counting cable news companies as traditional, you're probably 30 or younger and don't remember when news companies actually did research and had editors that fact-checked.
For as long as I can remember, news television has been a total joke. There's Democratic News and Republican News and both are obvious liars. I never read newspapers so I don't know if those are any better but I imagine not.
Let's be honest, who is actually willing to take the time and effort to read the exact same news from every possible news source to determine the legatimacy of all of the articles' claims, "facts", and opinions. What these kids are likely doing is spreading themselves out, covering all of the sources, and coming back together to discuss them; better than reading one news source, but also worse than reading all of them. At least that's the perspective that I get from the author's writting.
Judging by the handles of these accounts it wouldn't surprise me with kids only followed accounts that aligned with their current beliefs which may end up leading to the echo chamber you previously mentioned (however I must disagree that it's not the direct copy and pasting that makes it an echo chamber, its the copy and pasting of ideas). But also because of the online and pseudonymous nature of the internet it also wouldn't surprise me if people also joined communities that didn't align with their beliefs just to experiment with them. Perhaps even engage in more civilized debates on Instagram than in /r/the_donald.
But also as an occasional user of Instagram I find it weird for them to even be having long winded debates on the app. It was designed to be a photosharing app with comments, not a place for discussion threads. But maybe I'm too old now ️
It does fight against a situation where the news would be lying though. Recently we've heard about many news outlets getting something wrong accidentally or maybe even deliberately. What they do on Instagram would probably help against that.
Are you crazy? Almost nobody sees or reads corrections. They're usually in small print to some side, where they reluctantly might retract something.
At least on social media if the correction is big enough it'll be brought to people's attention.
Have you really never seen a correction posted on reddit? Every other day there's some news article that has as the first comment a correction of the article, because the article is wrong or leaving something out.
> At least on social media if the correction is big enough it'll be brought to people's attention.
And if it's not, it wasn't big enough, or if it was big, but people didn't like it enough because it doesn't suit them, then it still doesn't get spread. Doesn't make it less of a correction though, does it? If you apply something super vague as "big enough" to one, apply it to the other as well.
> Have you really never seen a correction posted on reddit?
Same here: have you really never seen a correction in a newspaper? Or letters by readers taking issue with previous articles, for that matter?
> Every other day there's some news article that has as the first comment a correction of the article, because the article is wrong or leaving something out.
That says nothing without looking at the volume of falsehoods that are uncontested, or at the instances where the article is correct, and then the comments contain falsehoods about the subject.
Isn't this already what supposedly happens on reddit? And it proves very easy to game: a handful of cooperating accounts can change the narrative very easily, irrespective of the facts.
We should lay judgement more on this being a sign of the times than the fact that it is "young people" doing this. So what's the implication, that the young are stupid? It's our culture, we should own up to it. If any significant amount of the mainstream news were considered to be outright propaganda, then you wouldn't find their behavior odd - right?
> Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network.
Imho that's a bit simplified. While the article doesn't actually mention this, I'm very convinced that this is also the result of news media increasingly relying on social media for their reporting themselves.
At this point, even traditional old-school media like TV and print are constantly quoting social media posts when reporting on something. Used to be that big media outlets would at least interview renowned experts, but that seems to be largely replaced by "Jonny on Twitter said".
For people as young as those in the article, this must be literally the only "news media" they've ever known, but they grew up with social media, so traditional news media just quoting social media is kinda redundant to them, as they are usually so familiar with social media that they don't need the traditional media as a "middleman" but could just as well look up these responses themselves without having them get "filtered" by a media outlet.
> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
I also wouldn't be too surprised if a couple of these, supposedly 13 years old, admins turn out to be actual adults who are getting paid for pushing certain agendas.
I don't think I agree with this. Some news media rely on social media for certain kind of news and to a certain extent. But I don't see it as enough to argue that news media are "increasingly relying on social media for reporting themselves".
I mean, news media quote tweets just as they could quote someone's public declarations. I think the difference between quoting a tweet from a senator and what these pseudonymous accounts do is very clear.
I think this has always happened among teens. When Facebook was popular among adolescent groups, FB pages existed that were identical to the messages shared on these "flop accounts".
This might be the first tech trend (at least, that I'm aware of) that I was completely unaware of and do not understand at all because of my age (late twenties).
I think you are giving too much credit to the uniqueness of this.
It seems not any different than subreddits or similar: they just making inflammatory meme posts based on hot topics and then people are discussing them in in the moderated comments.
Just a few years ago these guys had the main mediums of information covered, sure there was internet, but up until now it wasn't in palms of everyones hands.
And this new medium tends to be decentrilised, cheap for everyone to access and anyone can be the creator of content.
And on the issue of quality of information, sure it can be shit. Memes, number of character restrictions etc, forum moderators being biased, thumbs ups and downs do seem like we are going back to coloseum times, boos and hoorays, instead of stating our arguments in words. It kind of does seem like we are going backwards.
However big media is full of shit too, is censored in one way or the other, and is highly susceptible to corruption.
Truth (the whole truth and nothing the truth) cannot be presented in 2000-3000 words. Those people at CERN take petabytes of information to be sure what is truth, on the stuff that is real and measurable. And even when they come up with an answer they say "We are 5 000 000 to 1 sure that this particle exists".
And what we are mostly talking here about are abstract philosophical concepts and social sciences like economy, law, ethics, psychology etc. Unmeasurable things (at least pretty far from accurately and completely).
These philosphical, wordsy, matters are thus super easy to manipulate with.
Fake news, flops, deepfakes, resonating echo chambers.....All I see is big media being scared of loosing their power.
I don't see it as any different to any forum, IRC channel, social network group page, or group chat in an IM. 4chan, SA, Fark, car forums, etc etc.
It's literally just teenagers making a group chat to shoot the shit. How is that anything new or controversial in any way? We did it on BBSes and IRC, then teens did it on MySpace and Facebook, now it's Instagram and Snapchat.
61 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadWitness the power of small Whatsapp groups for example.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/technology/wh...
All important things start small. It can be useful to pay attention to small, interesting phenomena.
It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network.
> “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us information,” Dann said. “The fact that we’re all posting about these things means we all have to do research and it’s a lot of people completing these things together, not just one person, which makes us trust it more.”
Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc. Previous generations couldn't do that so easily. So a complete distrust of news shouldn't be surprising.. they aren't really very trustworthy in the first place.
These teens don't need to trust the instagram accounts, which is the whole point. The account just makes a post to bring up a discussion point, whether or not that point is fact-checked is irrelevant. (Its mostly gossip with political/moral/idealogical/etc angles anyway)/
It says it right there in the article.
My point is that conventional news can be biased, but they're much harder to bias than this nonsense. Conventional news would pretty much require the entire media company to be on your side, which would require a lot of money. This would only require a few fake accounts to skew, at maybe 1% the cost of what it takes to skew conventional news.
Are you saying these cannot happen via conventional outlets?
By contrast, what these kids are doing, trying to pressure and misinform each other, is exactly what I'd want them to do : they're learning. Maybe, God forbid, they'll learn how that works and when it's being done to them.
And that, I'm sure, a decent fraction of them will disagree with you ... that's a very good thing indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies
This is a much-underestimated factor that didn't exist, on that scale, previously.
When I was hanging out in chat groups in the late 90's I didn't have to worry about my conversational partner having, financially motivated and sinister, motives to change my opinions about certain topics.
Except for straight up scams, but nobody had a vested financial interest in "convincing" me about something.
These days there's a whole industry built around exactly that (social media marketing), the web is full of dishonest information players, even on a governmental level, on literally all sides. This isn't even that new, it's a development that the US military caught on years ago [0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
Living inside a bubble of criticism and misinformation doesn't lead one to immediately question and then reform the system. More often, people choose to adapt to their environment which only perpetuates the existing infrastructure.
Instead of pointlessly debating each other on this app, a platform designed to capture attention and manipulate emotions, these people should take time to research and then carefully write an essay. Once they are satisfied with their opinions, they could share their thesis with the public and request contestation.
If we simply continue with this twitter/facebook/instagram trend of summarizing our most important debates in 150 words or less in a brief amount of time, we're only going to become less educated and more vulnerable to coercion.
Someone probably write this same thing about news papers when they were a recent invention. Television also.
> these people should take time to research and then carefully write an essay. Once they are satisfied with their opinions, they could share their thesis with the public and request contestation.
More people than ever before are now university educated, or presently attending university. That’s got to help counteract the misinformation trend.
Well, I don't think television or the news paper is a good place to debate either. They do however give people more than 30 seconds to think about their responses.
When is the last time you've bought a physical newspaper? They are often lined up in such a way that you can compare headlines of several publications without even touching any of them.
And if that's actually the reason, then why should only kids be privy to this? None of this is actually that new, imho it's a very similar dynamic to that whole "MSM is fake-news, that's why I get all my news from Facebook groups" trend.
But instead of Facebook (which is where by now only "old people" hang out), these kids use Instagram, which happens to be the social media platform of choice for their range of age because it's literally a Facebook product rebranded to do exactly that: Appeal to a younger audience.
I beg to differ. I learn more viewpoints on HN than on media. CNN has reliably demonstrated systematically adding a spin to all their reporting (for example « women are the only victims of donestic violence and no women is guilty of anything », just by skipping the reporting on male victims), so much that Americans trust CNN lower than congress. At that point a mix of random viewpoints from Instagram, is way better than one media who claims to deliver the truth and reliably doesn’t.
If anything, news media need to seriously stop this nonsense, and at least it should not be possible with simple fact-checking to notice that they are spinning news all the way up to making falsehoods out of individually correct statements.
Reminds me of one of the main reasons I enjoy discussions on HN so much.
> ...instead of just depending on one source giving us information... The fact that we’re all posting about these things means we all have to do research
Therein lies the rub - how do you vet the "research" of your peers in content that seems to largely not cite references? My guess is that they are likely to be using the same sources of information without realizing or acknowledging it.
I mean they probably are. It’s unlikely these kids are running their Instagram channels as loss leaders with the real goal of selling billion dollar military technology.
It's just reinforcing the current, rather hysteric, narrative that Russia is to blame for everything from Trump getting elected, to Brexit, and even the generally rising "right wing" sentiments.
As somebody outside the Anglo-Saxon sphere, looking at places like Reddit, it feels like people are being riled up for a war, and it seems to be working extremely well.
Everyone has some biases... but I know which entity is more trustworthy. The one that stands by their name in public.
There’s a different type of error distribution.
The baseline issue is that media firms doing boring news are not marginally competitive, against a new cycle driven sensational news channel.
The noisy channel will get more viewers, more ad space and eventually buy out the other channel.
Part of the problem is unbridled efforts to apply psych and marketing research to win market share (a corporate necessity).
And the other part is also an Intellectual malaise in many viewers.
I think we just give it all up and start working for the men with the power. The situation seems unsolvable, and people are pretty much only investing in systems That propagate this phenomenon.
All news needs to become more boring and fact based - yesterday.
This arms race for attention will not stop. Market competition is a crap system when a common resource is allowed to be exploited - in this case, collective attention.
Given the state of conventional news, can you blame them? Foxnews is just a republican party news organization. And everything else ( CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYTimes, NPR, etc ) are a democratic party news organization.
It is sad that news has become so political and none of it is reliable. It's just one political side lying, exaggerating, clickbaiting and hating the other political side. It's a political/news war and the first casualty of any war is the truth.
Maybe it was always this way and I was just too young and naive to notice.
> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
As long as they don't censor, it won't be an echo chamber. Social media only becomes an echo chamber when the company takes sides. Sadly, google, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc are being forced to take sides with disastrous results. It doesn't help that formerly trusted organizations like the SPLC and ADL have turned extremely biased and unreliable.
The worst part is that news companies are at the forefront of pushing for censoring on the internet. Which creates more echo chambers, which creates more divisions. But I suppose that is good for ratings and that's all that matters to news companies. Not truth, not objectivity. Just ratings.
Given how toxic news media has gotten, it's better than teens stay away from it entirely. How many adults go insane watching CNN, MSNBC or Foxnews? Too many. The news industry has only itself to blame for it's predicament. Nobody trust news for a reason.
Yep, groupthink runs rampant on social media, just as it does on HN and other fora.
This thread will generate the usual boilerplate blathering about "Faux News" and "Wapo" and on and on and on, when the total news output of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WP, and the rest of the outlets that get people all frothing at the mouth and picking up their tribal pitchforks and torches is less than 1% of the actual news published in America on any given day.
The people who seem the most upset by the state of news today are the people who consume only from a few national sources, but never think to pick up their local newspaper where there are actual stories about the actual places they live that affect them in ways they don't even know because they can't be bothered with dead tree editions.
They use a lot of lame echo-chamber excuses about "portability this" and "digital future that" to explain away their laziness. Plus 20- and 30-somethings these days are unwilling to pay 50¢ for some factual information to accompany their $8.00 coffee and their $1,000 phones.
It may be hard for some people to grip, but 99.99999% of the news stories published in an average day have nothing to do with Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. But you'd never know it if the internet is the only way you consume information.
What happens in the White House or Congress or the United Nations or North Korea affects people infinitely less than the new water main going in down the street, or how a local politician is spending their money, or whether it was their neighbor's kid who got killed in that bad rollover crash you saw on your way home from work.
For the record, I subscribe to five newspapers and one magazine. Three of the newspapers are in printed form. Of those, one newspaper is local, the others come by mail from other cities where I have interests. The magazine is also in print form, and comes weekly. The remaining two newspapers are digital. My wife subscribes to an industry journal which arrives in printed form DAILY as a broadsheet, six days a week, and has a supplemental app for breaking news.
The printed articles she pulls from her newspaper and leaves on my desk for me to read are generally a week to 10 days ahead of the internet.
When my newspapers arrive, the first thing I do is pull out the Opinion sections and toss them in the blue bin. America would be better off if newspapers didn't have opinion sections to reinforce all of society's divisiveness. It was OK back when cities had six or seven daily newspapers. But today, it's a disservice to the public.
I also pull out the comics section/page and read that first. If I don't manage to get past that much of a particular paper, it's still time well spent.
If you're counting cable news companies as traditional, you're probably 30 or younger and don't remember when news companies actually did research and had editors that fact-checked.
Judging by the handles of these accounts it wouldn't surprise me with kids only followed accounts that aligned with their current beliefs which may end up leading to the echo chamber you previously mentioned (however I must disagree that it's not the direct copy and pasting that makes it an echo chamber, its the copy and pasting of ideas). But also because of the online and pseudonymous nature of the internet it also wouldn't surprise me if people also joined communities that didn't align with their beliefs just to experiment with them. Perhaps even engage in more civilized debates on Instagram than in /r/the_donald.
But also as an occasional user of Instagram I find it weird for them to even be having long winded debates on the app. It was designed to be a photosharing app with comments, not a place for discussion threads. But maybe I'm too old now ️
Every subscriber of a traditional newspaper will see their corrections, often published the next day.
How does Instagram/social media compare? In my experience, it doesn't. I've never seen a correction come through anonymous social media channels.
At least on social media if the correction is big enough it'll be brought to people's attention.
Have you really never seen a correction posted on reddit? Every other day there's some news article that has as the first comment a correction of the article, because the article is wrong or leaving something out.
Unless they're "big enough".
> At least on social media if the correction is big enough it'll be brought to people's attention.
And if it's not, it wasn't big enough, or if it was big, but people didn't like it enough because it doesn't suit them, then it still doesn't get spread. Doesn't make it less of a correction though, does it? If you apply something super vague as "big enough" to one, apply it to the other as well.
> Have you really never seen a correction posted on reddit?
Same here: have you really never seen a correction in a newspaper? Or letters by readers taking issue with previous articles, for that matter?
> Every other day there's some news article that has as the first comment a correction of the article, because the article is wrong or leaving something out.
That says nothing without looking at the volume of falsehoods that are uncontested, or at the instances where the article is correct, and then the comments contain falsehoods about the subject.
Imho that's a bit simplified. While the article doesn't actually mention this, I'm very convinced that this is also the result of news media increasingly relying on social media for their reporting themselves.
At this point, even traditional old-school media like TV and print are constantly quoting social media posts when reporting on something. Used to be that big media outlets would at least interview renowned experts, but that seems to be largely replaced by "Jonny on Twitter said".
For people as young as those in the article, this must be literally the only "news media" they've ever known, but they grew up with social media, so traditional news media just quoting social media is kinda redundant to them, as they are usually so familiar with social media that they don't need the traditional media as a "middleman" but could just as well look up these responses themselves without having them get "filtered" by a media outlet.
> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).
I also wouldn't be too surprised if a couple of these, supposedly 13 years old, admins turn out to be actual adults who are getting paid for pushing certain agendas.
I mean, news media quote tweets just as they could quote someone's public declarations. I think the difference between quoting a tweet from a senator and what these pseudonymous accounts do is very clear.
It seems not any different than subreddits or similar: they just making inflammatory meme posts based on hot topics and then people are discussing them in in the moderated comments.
And this new medium tends to be decentrilised, cheap for everyone to access and anyone can be the creator of content.
And on the issue of quality of information, sure it can be shit. Memes, number of character restrictions etc, forum moderators being biased, thumbs ups and downs do seem like we are going back to coloseum times, boos and hoorays, instead of stating our arguments in words. It kind of does seem like we are going backwards.
However big media is full of shit too, is censored in one way or the other, and is highly susceptible to corruption.
Truth (the whole truth and nothing the truth) cannot be presented in 2000-3000 words. Those people at CERN take petabytes of information to be sure what is truth, on the stuff that is real and measurable. And even when they come up with an answer they say "We are 5 000 000 to 1 sure that this particle exists".
And what we are mostly talking here about are abstract philosophical concepts and social sciences like economy, law, ethics, psychology etc. Unmeasurable things (at least pretty far from accurately and completely).
These philosphical, wordsy, matters are thus super easy to manipulate with.
Fake news, flops, deepfakes, resonating echo chambers.....All I see is big media being scared of loosing their power.
It's literally just teenagers making a group chat to shoot the shit. How is that anything new or controversial in any way? We did it on BBSes and IRC, then teens did it on MySpace and Facebook, now it's Instagram and Snapchat.