Access to news via social media

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According to this survey data, In 2017 two-thirds of U.S. adults got their news from various forms of social media, the majority from Facebook. This proportion also skewed towards the less educated, the older, and the non-white demographics.

At the same time, there was still plenty of reliance on "old fashioned" media outlets, among these same adults:



... So it's not a complete change, but still a pretty huge one compared to, say, ten years ago.

I see this trend reflected in my own habits. In the 90's I got most of my news from a newspaper. In the 2000's that shifted online, to aggregations run by search engines - Google, Yahoo, etc - and now I get half my news from dedicated "news" apps, a quarter from social media, and a quarter from a hodgepodge of podcasts. It's much more on-the-spot and way, way less investigative, and the line has blurred between trained journalists attempting impartiality, and bloggers who think impartiality is not just impossible, but actually the enemy of their "truth".

And aren't we all - all us online readers and writers - guilty of this, when we cherry-pick the references we need to make a point? Of course. But perhaps that makes us especially qualified to know bullshit when we see it.

There was a minor panic about a decade ago over "sponsored content" online. That is, writer-for-hire work that was disguised to look like unsolicited opinion, used to deceive people into buying a product, going to a movie, choosing a political candidate, et cetera. It was noticed, discussed, condemned ... and then eventually forgotten, and ignored. The "fake news" controversy of the last few years is a recasting of this problem: Now instead of media constructed to imitate the honest, folksy language of the "man on the street", we are seeing media constructed to imitate the impartial language of the press, "reporting" on non-events, to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Assuming the consumption of news through social media continues to grow - and I've no doubt it will - what will prevent the sort of gross manipulation we're already seeing? Not just in the realm of salesmen astroturfing for their products, but in nations stirring jingoistic and nationalistic conflict among their neighbors? Did social media companies like Facebook and Instagram get us into this mess? Is it their responsibility to counteract it? Or perhaps we should push back for the early days of the internet, when nobody had any verifiable identity online, and so there was no choice but to heavily mistrust everything one encountered there...