14 FEATURE
FEBRUARY 7, 2020
Social media
breeds
biased
information
Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, an alltime high according to Pew Research Center.
History teacher Mike Egner begins his class by talking about current events Jan. 28. Egner believes social media is the worst source for news because you do not know where the information is coming from.
Story by Lily Hart | Editor-in-chief Photos by Katie Massman Twitter Editor
sources to consult, so that you can be the one to decide what the ‘real news’ is,” Egner said. “Remember what I say all the time — personal responsibility. If you don’t make the effort yourself to increase your knowledge about an issue or a candidate or an event then nobody can help you.” Current Events club copresident Molly Langdon attributes the unreliability of social mediagenerated news to this bias.
“we’re not willing to If listen to people’s points of view on any issues, then we’re headed down a dark road. Nobody likes darks roads Mike egner
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he only advice that social studies teacher Mike Egner has for those who choose to get their news exclusively from social media is “why?” According to a Pew Research Center report, two-thirds of Americans get their news at least in part from social media as of August 2017. Pew attributes this to being a part of the upwards trend of more and more people seeking news from media sites. “A lot of people — I don’t know why — believe that social media is the only way to get news,” Egner said. “In my opinion, it’s probably the worst way to get news because you’re never sure of the source.” According to Peter Suciu from Forbes, “bias that might not exist in the actual pages of the newspapers does unfortunately have a way of showing up on social media.” With this sentiment in mind, Egner not only advocates for people to stay informed, but he believes in diversifying the sources one goes to for news. An active follower of current events, he has a portfolio of news sources he draws from. This includes network and cable news channels, and ranges from CNN to Fox News. “Why not benefit yourself by giving yourself a range of different
“You shouldn’t be looking for your news to see what other people think about it, it’s what you think about it,” Langdon said. “If you find a source that’s not credible, it’s going to be what someone else thinks about it, and then the freedom of how you read things is almost taken away because you’re being forced into
this opinion because it’s believed to be a fact now.” Both Langdon and senior Molly Sexton want to emphasize that young kids are especially at risk for consuming ‘fake news’ or inaccurate accounts of current events now that it is more commonplace for them to be online and on social media. “Kids are younger and younger on social media, they’ll just believe anything,” Sexton said. “My brother is 11 and he does all the social media stuff and I don’t he has the knowledge to know what’s true and what’s not true. I think that’s the tough part of it.” Sexton primarily gets her news from Twitter but acknowledges this news source’s downsides. She cross references her news with other sources such as other Twitter accounts or official news sites, to make sure she is getting unbiased information. “[Twitter is] just the most convenient,” Sexton said. “Occasionally I’ll go off and look at other articles, but I also like to see what individual people who aren’t news reporters or journalists have to say. Unless I hear it from multiple accounts, then I can’t assume that it’s 100% true.” Langdon agrees that Twitter can be a vessel for news, but that
