2.3: Benefits and Challenges of Social Media

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Team building at RGB Parkour Tour back in 2014. This is now available for purchase on Rounce's RedBubble store. (Unsplash free-to-use license; Shane Rounce)

Social media allows for an unprecedented volume of personal, informal communication in real-time from anywhere in the world. It allows users to keep in touch with friends on other continents and fosters casual conversations to take place even where great physical distances separate users. Blogs, including microblogging sites, allow us to gauge a wide variety of opinions in real time. These have given “breaking news” a whole new meaning. Now, news can be distributed throughout various social media platforms almost instantaneously, and different perspectives on an event can be aired concurrently. In addition, news organizations can harness social media users as sources for real-time news updates, in effect outsourcing some of their news-gathering efforts to bystanders on the scene.

This practice of harnessing the efforts of several individuals online to solve a problem is known as crowdsourcing.

The downside of the seemingly infinite breadth of online information is that there is often not much depth of coverage. The superficiality of information online is a common concern for journalists who are now rushed to file news reports several times a day in an effort to compete with influencers and others who may be more focused on short-term clout than long-term social understanding.

Popular influencers are free to post original news stories but often prefer to aggregate previously published news from other sources. This enables both the social media producer and social media platforms to profit off of the legwork done by professional journalists.

Whereas traditional print organizations at least had the “luxury” of the daily print deadline, now journalists may be expected to post multiple times per day as their stories develop, which does not leave as much time for fact checking and analysis.

For more on this topic, which has been a challenge for nearly two decades at the time of writing, read Ken Auletta’s “Non-Stop News,” Annals of Communications, New Yorker, January 25, 2010.

Additionally, news aggregators like Google News profit from linking to journalists’ stories at major newspapers and selling advertising. Although Google shares some revenue with news outlets, estimates are that Google utilizes $14 billion worth of news content each year and returns nowhere near that amount to news companies.¹⁵

It is often difficult for journalists to keep up with the immediacy of the nonstop news cycle, and with revenues for their efforts being diverted to news aggregators, journalists and news organizations increasingly lack the resources to keep up this fast pace. News organizations have been shedding jobs and folding at alarming rates over the past two decades.¹⁶

Twitter (X) presents a similar problem: Instead of getting news from a specific newspaper, many news consumers simply read the articles that are linked from their X feed. This does not afford for any payment to go to the news organizations or journalists who actually reported the news, although, as stated, the constant flow of information on X and similar social media platforms creates constant deadline pressure for many in the news industry.

The constant news cycle leaves journalists little time for analysis or cross-examination of interview subjects. Increasingly, journalists will simply report, for example, what a politician or public relations representative says without following up on these comments to fact-check if they are true or how true they are. It is common for journalists to receive half-truths from public relations and public affairs professionals.

When public relations pros do their job, they represent the best interests of the organization they represent. They do not tend to lie to journalists, but they may leave out important information to audiences that would harm their client if it were the focus of a news story. Thus audiences receive quite a bit of news that, although factually true, only represents a part of the real story. In other times and other contexts, these “sins of omission” might have been caught more often and more quickly by virtue of the regular reporting process of professional journalists.

With shortened and de-contextualized news cycles, it is much easier for journalists to be exploited as mouthpieces for corporate, government and political propaganda. Here, propaganda does not necessarily mean lies. It means something closer to “persuasive speech.”¹⁷

Consequently, the very presence of social media influencers and their importance even among mainstream media has made some critics wary. Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen is one of these people, and his book The Cult of the Amateur follows up on the famous thought experiment suggesting that infinite monkeys, given infinite typewriters, will one day randomly produce a great work of literature.

Proposed by T.H. Huxley (the father of Aldous Huxley), this thought experiment suggests that infinite monkeys given infinite typewriters would, given infinite time, eventually write Hamlet. “In our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren’t quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren’t quite monkeys, but rather Internet users.”

Keen also suggests that the Internet is really just a case of my-word-against-yours, where bloggers (to which we would now add influencers) are not required to back up their arguments with credible sources.¹⁸

“These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on [a random website],” Keen said.

Commentators like Keen worry that this trend will lead to people’s inability to distinguish credible information from a mass of sources, eventually leading to a sharp decrease of credible sources of information. In fact, since Keen first wrote about these concerns there has arisen widespread concern that information consumers no longer know whom to trust in news and social media.

It is not just the spread of misinformation and disinformation that weakens society. It is the breakdown in trust in well-supported, well-researched and informative news resulting from the sense of chaos created in social media platforms that weakens the social fabric.

For defenders of the Internet, this argument seems a bit overblown. A 2009 article by Greg Downey said: “A legitimate interest in the possible effects of significant technological change in our daily lives can inadvertently dovetail seamlessly into a ‘kids these days’ curmudgeonly sense of generational degeneration, which is hardly new.”¹⁹

Downey offers that, on the contrary, “far from evacuating narrative, some social networking sites might be said to cause users to ‘narrativize’ their experience, engaging with everyday life already with an eye toward how they will represent it on their personal pages.”

But since 2009, purposeful disinformation campaigns have become commonplace on social media platforms, and massively wealthy and influential individuals have purchased news outlets and social media platforms with the intent to influence policy or to limit others’ influence.

Social media’s detractors also point to the sheer banality of much of the conversation on the Internet. Again, Downey keeps this in perspective: “The banality of most conversation is also pretty frustrating,” he says. Downey suggests that many of the young people using social networking tools see them as just another aspect of communication; however, Downey warns that online bullying can pervade larger social networks while shielding perpetrators through anonymity.

Another downside of many of the Internet’s segmented communities is that users tend to be exposed only to the information they are interested in and opinions they agree with, sometimes referred to as an “echo chamber.” This lack of exposure to novel ideas and contrary opinions can create or reinforce a lack of understanding among people with different beliefs, and make political and social compromise more difficult to come by.

Algorithms that aim to keep users hooked on social media apps and video websites may send users down “rabbit holes” where information not only reiterates similar messages but trends in the direction of more and more extreme content. Shocking and titillating people is one means of holding their attention, but users, for instance on YouTube, have been known to begin consuming content with little or no political bent only to end up in a short amount of time viewing incredibly extremist content.²⁰

There are clearly some important arguments to consider regarding the effects of the web and social media in particular. The main concerns come down to two things: the possibility that the volume of amateur, user-generated content online is overshadowing better-researched sources, and the questionable ability of users to tell the difference between the two.

 

Privacy Issues With Social Networking

Social networking provides unprecedented ways to keep in touch with friends, but that ability can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Users can update friends with every latest achievement—“[your name here] just won three straight games of solitaire!”—but may also unwittingly be updating bosses and others from whom particular bits of information should be hidden. The shrinking of privacy online has been rapidly exacerbated by social networks, and for a surprising reason: conscious decisions made by participants. Putting personal information online—even if it is set to be viewed by only select friends—has become fairly standard.

Dr. Kieron O’Hara studies privacy in social media and calls this era “Intimacy 2.0,” (Zoe Kleinman, “How Online Life Distorts Privacy Rights for All,” BBC News, January 8, 2010), a riff on the buzzword “Web 2.0.” One of O’Hara’s arguments is that legal issues of privacy are based on what is called a “reasonable standard.” According to O’Hara, the excessive sharing of personal information on the Internet by some constitutes an offense to the privacy of all, because it lowers the “reasonable standard” that can be legally enforced. In other words, as cultural tendencies toward privacy degrade on the Internet, it affects not only the privacy of those who choose to share their information but also the privacy of those who do not.

Social media on the Internet has been around for a while, and it has always been of some interest to professional communicators. The ability to target messages based on demographic information given willingly to the service—age, political preference, gender, and location—allows communicators to target messages extremely efficiently. Increasingly, communicators are turning to social networks as a way to reach these publics, even creating a new category of employment called Social Media "Influencers" and "Content Creators" who monetize their fanbase on various sites and apps. Culturally, these developments indicate a mistrust among consumers of traditional campaign techniques; communicators must now use new and more personalized ways of reaching publics if they are going to sell their products.

Social media enables real-time, informal communication globally, facilitating personal connections and rapid news distribution. Blogs and platforms like X and TikTok contribute to a constant stream of news and information, where speed often comes at the cost of depth and thorough fact-checking. Crowdsourcing news from bloggers and on-the-ground bystanders has become a common practice, but it raises concerns about the credibility and superficiality of information.

Critics like Andrew Keen argue that the proliferation of amateur content overshadows professional journalism, while defenders like Greg Downey see social media as a valuable tool for narrative-building and niche community engagement. Concerns about privacy and targeted marketing also persist, with social networks contributing to a broader erosion of personal privacy norms.

Discussion 2.3

1. How has the real-time nature of social media impacted the depth and reliability of news reporting? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using platforms like X and TikTok in modern journalism?

2. Do you agree with Andrew Keen's concerns about the dominance of amateur content over professional journalism on the internet? How do you think this affects public perception of news and information credibility? How does the advancement and proliferation of AI affect the credibility of information shared across social media?

3. How do social media privacy concerns, such as those raised by Dr. Kieron O’Hara, shape the way users interact with social media platforms? How have privacy concerns shaped the way you interact with social media? In what ways can PR practices adapt to this shift in online behavior that is more protective of privacy?

15. Gitanjali Poonia, “New Study Says Google and Facebook Owe U.S. News Outlets $14B Every Year for Content,” Deseret News, November 13, 2023, https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/13/23959128/new-study-says-google-and-facebook-owe-u-s-news-outlets-14b-every-year-for-content/
16. David Bauder, “A Bleak Outlook for Journalism as McClatchy, Other News Outlets Face Major Layoffs,” Associated Press, October 30, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/journalism-layoffs-business-messenger-83afe18984c2a1fc78e78184dddee17d
17. Cambridge University Press, s.v. “Propaganda,” Cambridge English Dictionary, accessed November 1, 2024, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/propaganda
18. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
19. Kevin Downey, “Is Facebook Rotting Our Children’s Brains?” Media Life Magazine, 2009.
20. NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, “Christo Wilson on ‘The Rabbit Hole of YouTube,’” Northeastern University, accessed November 1, 2024, https://cssh.northeastern.edu/nulab/christo-wilson-rabbit-hole-youtube/