From Hashtags to Headlines: The Significance of Social Media in Modern Journalism

Photo Courtesy: Jernej Furman (Via Wikimedia Commons)

There is no doubt that social media has a chokehold over our society. People use these platforms everyday as a way to connect to their friends and to wider society, by following trends on apps such as Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. 

It is this ability to effectively transmit information to society that has led to social media’s increasing role in modern journalism. Now more than ever, it is important to discuss what implications social media may have for current and future journalists, as both a cause for concern and a potentially invaluable tool for those in the industry.

The threat of disinformation

The prevalence of these platforms was highlighted once again just last month, when it was revealed that TikTok intends to launch new ‘election centres’ in a bid to prevent further disinformation online, with several important elections set to take place in 2024. 

Unfortunately, disinformation is a dangerous consequence of widespread social media use. One of the most notable examples was the aftermath of the US 2020 elections, when Donald Trump falsely claimed on his social media that the elections were rigged against him. It was on the basis of these falsehoods that many of Trump’s followers rioted at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. 

And such disinformation has only become increasingly prevalent in our society since 2020. In response, TikTok has made the necessary decision to partner with several global fact checking organisations and flag factually verified and unverified content.

But it has also become clear that such platforms cannot always be trusted to operate on their own. Besides the threat of disinformation, social media can now pose larger risks, even to national security. The Biden administration has stated that TikTok poses a national security threat to the US, because the Chinese company ByteDance which owns TikTok could be compelled to illegally share American user data. 

The importance of imposing legal restrictions has thus been all over recent news, as the US government enters the process to pass a bill that threatens to ban TikTok from operating in the States. For the same reason, the EU commission has also started formal proceedings to investigate whether the platform has breached its DSA (Digital Services Act).

Increasing accessibility 

Despite its threat to the journalism industry, however, it is undeniable that social media’s influence has also been beneficial. Journalists can now connect to a wider network of individuals who may have valuable information about ongoing news stories, with whom they may not have been able to make contact through other means. 

We have also seen the rise of citizen journalists, as news organisations are able to quickly update their audiences with photos or comments from individuals on the scene of breaking news stories. And overall, journalists and citizens alike are better able to hold their governments accountable, allowing democracy to thrive.

Ultimately, social media has started a revolution in facilitating connections between people. In the beginning, innovators couldn’t have predicted the various uses their platforms would evolve to take on, serving not just as means of entertainment, but also as platforms that would give people access to all their daily news - social media’s easy accessibility means that around half of American adults, for example, now receive their news through these various platforms. 

Changing content forever? An interview with Yuri Bender

TikTok has also become such a prevalent media platform over the past few years that other news media organisations have also started to release short-form video content to encourage more viewership. For example, at Pi Media, we’ve expanded to creating video content which you can see at the PiTV YouTube channel and Instagram - where our short-form content has amassed over 30k views this year alone.

Because of this change in reporting style, however, fewer people now venture to read written material by journalists. An Ofcom report for 2023 showed that there has been a steady decline of news consumption via print media, even if some is supplemented by digital websites.

 I was fortunate enough to interview Yuri Bender - a journalist for the Financial Times, Editor in Chief of Professional Wealth Management (PWM) and a PhD student at UCL - regarding this change in reporting style and the importance of long-form written media. 

Mr Bender explained that “Because of falling attention spans and the fact that people are used to reading short snippets on Twitter and social media, the long-form article is under threat.” He went on to say that “I think as journalists it's our responsibility to raise our game, improve the quality of our analyses and to maintain this quality for our readership, because many topics are impossible to analyse in a short article”. 

To this end, Mr Bender gave many examples of topics that cannot be covered on social media alone. For example, “If we look at the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, there have been several films looking at it but we need essays to analyse that and why it happened. The war in Ukraine as well, I’ve seen very simplistic reports about that in the newspapers, on the radio about Ukraine’s split between East and West which don’t even begin to look at the causes of the war, how history has led us to the situation we’re in today and what the future will look like for Ukraine and Russia.”

Looking to the future…

What does all of this mean for future journalists? There is no question that social media will continue to be a dominant force within society - future journalists will rely on it, and potentially AI, to continue reporting and writing in the modern world. 

It is therefore of the utmost importance that social media platforms strive to show more transparency regarding their sources of information and of how their user data is used. Organisations such as Pink News are making such steps to ensure transparency by listing their sources in some of their video content, while other news organisations are even leaving social media platforms to maintain control over their publication of news. 

It will be difficult, however, to ensure better media transparency without regulation. It will also be difficult for media sources to function fully without the existence of long-form content. Only a combination of short-form content and written content will allow the journalism industry to fully investigate, communicate news effectively and hold institutions to account.