15-Second-News: How Social Media has rewired News Consumption

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In 2012, as Mark Zuckerberg prepared Facebook for its IPO, he wrote that the goal of his company was to ‘help people relate to each other’. After 13 years and a name change, Meta does far more than that for its 3.5 billion users. From eye-wear to AI chatbots authorized to have 'sensual' conversations with teenagers, the corporation now has its fingers in a seemingly infinite number of money-filled pies. It has also come to completely reframe the way people engage with information across the globe; a third of the world’s population now consumes news through social media networks each week. Here in the UK, TikTok is the second most used source of news for young people, behind only the BBC. The statistics are in and the writing is on the wall: social media news does not seem to be going anywhere but upwards. With this in mind, it is worth taking a look at how this new form of consumption is changing the world, often for the worse.

Before delving into the effects of the current information epoch we live in, it is worth going over the architecture that social media functions on – particularly because it is fundamentally different to the traditional ways that news has previously been consumed, such as print, radio and TV. Social media was not originally intended to facilitate large scale information sharing between disparate groups of people. In a 2004 interview, Zuckerberg framed ‘The Facebook’ as a way to marginally widen one’s already extant social networks. Only much later did he begin to extoll the platform’s ability to democratise the previously ‘top down’ methods of creating and consuming information.

This ‘social by design’ style of information delivery marks a clear juncture from traditional methods, those that equate impersonality and lack of bias with quality and accuracy. A recent Reuters study found that users on TikTok pay 13% more attention to individual creators than mainstream news outlets. There is nothing self-evidently negative about this style of information dissemination. However, the algorithmic incentives inherent to all social media platforms, which individual creators are often more savvy and subject to, encourage higher degrees of partisanship than even the most brazen tabloid. 

Far left and particularly far right content has been shown to circulate at several times the rate of neutral news stories on social media, a phenomenon which often leads users to exist within polarized community bubbles, serving only to reinforce and further entrench their preexisting beliefs. The consequences of this can be seen most clearly in America, where over 60% of the population now believes the country is too divided to solve its own problems.

Despite the serious issue of the technology’s effects on growing political polarisation, social media’s primary issue as a source of news has continued to be misinformation. It has been documented since 2018 that falsehoods spread faster than the truth on Twitter; a problem which has only worsened since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, now ‘X’, and a staggering influx of bots, now estimated to be making up over 60% of the platform’s userbase. The consequences of this have sometimes been fatal. During the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitant narratives dominated social media platforms, specifically X. This, no doubt, contributed to many of the 232,000 deaths that vaccine hesitancy was estimated to have caused in the US alone. Furthermore, we saw how online misinformation can cause real damage last year when it triggered a wave of violent anti-immigration riots across the UK, causing millions of pounds in damage and leading to over 4,000 arrests. 

While social media news can often be more convenient and certainly more entertaining than a story written in total accordance with the AP styleguide, it can also lead people down dangerous rabbit-holes which can be hard to escape from. You might think, like many do, that your feed is an exception to the rule, and the news posts you scroll through really are an even-handed, accurate representation of present reality. However, you may well be wrong. Remember that the news we consume defines the world we live in. Try to live in the real one, for all our sakes.