- News Health
- Posts
- News Health: Social media is bad at news
News Health: Social media is bad at news
Read time: 2 minutes
Happy Sunday,
“Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways.”
Psalm 119:37
Do you get your news from social media?
For those of you not on social media, let me explain an important change that has happened in recent years.
Social media algorithms used to prioritize showing content from accounts that you follow. Back in 2007, that meant endless pictures of your cousin’s baby. By 2018, it meant endless pictures of Kim Kardashian. Then TikTok burst onto the scene with a different philosophy, and everyone (ahem, Zuckerberg) has since copied it: show content similar to stuff a user lingers on.
If I follow science accounts but linger longer on cat videos… I get more cat videos. I don’t actually like science; I like cats. The algorithm knows, and it doesn’t care what I say.
For content creators, this means each post must grab eyeballs—if the post is boring, it won’t be shown, no matter how many followers you have. This puts weird pressures on news accounts:
It means boring-but-valuable news isn’t even worth posting. For TPO, anything other than political news hardly gets any views.
It rewards exaggeration and lies. A post about medical news will get more views if the person in the video is wearing scrubs. They don’t need to be a doctor—just look like one.
A Pew Research poll conducted in August found that 53% of adults in the United States say they “sometimes” or “often” get news from social media. As someone who runs a news company, I think social media is perhaps the worst place to get news. That’s not to say that there aren’t good accounts or that fair reporting doesn’t happen on social media, but content creators are incentivized to share imbalanced half-truths or outright lies. That’s a bad environment if you’re looking for an accurate view of the world.
My recommendation? Get off social media completely. If you aren’t going to do that, use it for cat videos, not news.
What do you think?
Jason Woodruff
Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.