Jasmine Gardner: News travels fast in cyberspace but can we trust it? Social media is now a major source of information. The challenge is ensure that it is reliable and correct...
Rumour mill: according to social media, Manchester United manager David Moyes was sacked this week
Morgan Freeman has died three times: once on Twitter, twice on Facebook. Social media rumour — much to the relief, of Moyes, who had been tabled by tweeters to be losing his job at 2:30pm on Wednesday, after Manchester United’s 2-0 defeat in the Champions’ League to Olympiakos the day before.
The gossip spread quickly among fans: by midweek, bookmakers had 8/11 odds on Moyes being the next Premier League manager to leave his job. Moyes will be comforted to discover that a new project involving King’s College London called Pheme is attempting, over the next 18 months, to build a web app that would work out how likely a Twitter statement is to be true or false. Until then working out whose news you wish to repeat online will be an ever-growing. In the US a third of all adults under 30 are said to get their news from social media, with half of all Twitter users receiving their newsflashes in 140 characters. On Wednesday even talkSPORT presenter Andy Goldstein helped carry the whispers of Moyes’s departure, tweeting “Don’t know how true but NYSE apparently been told Moyes has been sacked.” Who to trust? Web companies such as PeerIndex and Klout have attempted to answer this, giving social media users a rating based on their influence across the web. Yet while being trustworthy could enhance your influence, so too can fame, which reduces the usefulness of these services in assessing reliability. In his TED talk on the subject, internet activist Eli Pariser said: “Instead of a balanced information diet you can end up surrounded by information junk food” — where everything we see online is only what we enjoy believing. On Facebook, unsurprisingly, most people’s news consumption comes through friends and family.
- Manchester United’s 2-0 defeat in the Champions’ League to Olympiakos
- Adults under 30 are said to get their news from social media
- A survey late last year by market researcher Populous showed that in Britain, Twitter is now an everyday news source for 55 per cent of opinion formers.
I think the social media has impacted a large audience, many people rely on the social media a lot and therefore think it is reliable. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and more allow people to interact with many people around the world but also can have negative points such as false information and targeting people. The audience should reply on main news providers such as The Guardian, The Mirror and many more as they would be reliable sources whereas the internet could contain false information that many can believe.
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