5 ms·

> Since social media is sorta supplanting traditional news I wonder if that's level of inaccuracy is actually that surprising. How many potential articles come

> Since social media is sorta supplanting traditional news I wonder if that's level of inaccuracy is actually that surprising. How many potential articles come across an editors desk - or as pushed out by a company's PR department - that are just BS? You make a fair point; a lot of news is either poorly researched or biased. That being said, at least MOST news outlets are trying to get to the truth. They may be lazy, uninformed, or incapable of viewing the world objectively instead of through a specific ideological lens, but they are trying. Truth seeking is not the goal for many people posting to social media. You call the content "editorialized" but it's more like fiction and deliberate disinformation.

munk-a 5y ago
I don't disagree with any of that but I wanted to clarify my point - it's that social media is our way of (mostly) removing the editorial filter from the process - so we're essentially reading all the news - as opposed to "all the news that's fit to print". I'd imagine that twitter's trending section doesn't look all too different from an editor's desk with random unsolicited story submissions along with press releases from companies all flooding in with a good portion of them being just entirely false and a larger portion being exceedingly misleading. Instead of relying on a professional to filter those down and potentially remove some stories we'd really like to see (i.e. some stories critical of the War in Iraq that countered the yellow cake and WMD narrative pushed by the administration) we now have to sort through all the crap - aided somewhat by the decisions of others who have expressed their opinion on whether a thing is a real story or not by engaging with it. Part of my interest in the story also comes from the fact that 50% is probably far higher a proportion of "true news" than what would actually reach the desk on the editor. And, I'd like to reiterate that I'm still very much on the fence about which system is better.
- OminousWeapons 5y ago
  That makes sense. Upon reading your initial post again more carefully, I realized that I misinterpreted what you were trying to say. Thank you for clarifying.

munk-a 5y ago

I don't disagree with any of that but I wanted to clarify my point - it's that social media is our way of (mostly) removing the editorial filter from the process - so we're essentially reading all the news - as opposed to "all the news that's fit to print". I'd imagine that twitter's trending section doesn't look all too different from an editor's desk with random unsolicited story submissions along with press releases from companies all flooding in with a good portion of them being just entirely false and a larger portion being exceedingly misleading. Instead of relying on a professional to filter those down and potentially remove some stories we'd really like to see (i.e. some stories critical of the War in Iraq that countered the yellow cake and WMD narrative pushed by the administration) we now have to sort through all the crap - aided somewhat by the decisions of others who have expressed their opinion on whether a thing is a real story or not by engaging with it. Part of my interest in the story also comes from the fact that 50% is probably far higher a proportion of "true news" than what would actually reach the desk on the editor. And, I'd like to reiterate that I'm still very much on the fence about which system is better.

OminousWeapons 5y ago
That makes sense. Upon reading your initial post again more carefully, I realized that I misinterpreted what you were trying to say. Thank you for clarifying.