Although I found the textbooks rules and laws portion interesting I would much rather focus on one of the articles we read which has to do with misinformation that is spread via social media. Social media is the land of information, very few filters and tons of ways to get that information. Take for example, Twitter where you can go click on a thread about a subject and see thousands of different opinions and ideas within seconds. There are bound to be opinions stated without any grounding at all. But what do these social media sites do to avoid people believing everything they see is verified and fact checked, they post a warning at the start of the thread stating something along the lines of "This post was not reviewed by fact checkers therefor some information may be false, proceed with caution, ". probably the best thing they can do is post a warning and hope people fact check for themselves, sometimes it is more difficult than that such as when COVID 19 first became a major issue and we saw an ever changing landscape online of things to do and things to not do. Even if we went by the advice of the CDC, the rules changed everyday and most social media platforms started having to add tags to any posts involving Covid.
Another interesting thing that the article talked about is how social media and misinformation can cause division amongst it's users. We can see this happening across any of the social media platforms but one specifically i'd like to talk about is tik tok and its use of the "for you," page. The page is designed to show content that you are believed to like, such as videos from one side of a political party or videos from one group of people. These videos confirm the beliefs that a person may have which strengthens their belief that they are right. Honestly now that I am aware of how divisive social media can be I try to skip past anything that is political or talking about issues in the now because I know if I like one video my timeline will be flooded with the same content.
Although I have already preface this by talking about how misinformation spreads based on my own personal experience I would like to talk about an article we read by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow in the article they talk about the how misinformation is spread and more specifically the misinformation we see with voters. In the article they ask what their most important news source was "14 percent of americans listed social media as "most important"," (Allcott and Gentzkow). Another important piece of informationation that I feel is left out is who is using each of these sites. Facebook is definitely a different generation then the majority of those who use instagram or tik tok, especially when they first began. These videos also circulate well when they hit their target audience which is why we in the article they saw "...Those favoring trump were shared 30 million times on Facebook..." (Allcott and Gentzkow). This video hit its demographic and performed just as planned by the creator. I thought the article definitely shed light on the fact that people can take a few mins to believe anything they see.
I think another interesting portion I would like to argue is that most millenial and gen z individuals use almost exclusively social media to get their news. I know from personal experience that I follow pages that are said to report unbiased news as it happens. But even I understand something that Dominik Stecula states in their article which is "..Using social media as a source of news is associated with increased likelihood of being misinformed about important topics..." (1). Honestly understanding that most people get their news from social media makes me question when someone tells me news, I tend to ask where they heard it or if it came directly from that person.
