Relying on Social Media for Your News? Not a Good Idea.

Do you rely on social media sites for your news? More of us do these days. It’s easy to feel like we’re informed through news stories that regularly waltz through our feeds.

Yet when we are lulled into the belief that we no longer need to make an effort to find good journalism, we can become part of the problem of the ignorance plaguing our public discourse. And we can make ill-informed ethical judgments about news workers.

More than 60 percent of Americans rely either wholly or in part on social media platforms for their news, by some measures, as do those in many other countries (Newman et al., 2018). And many of those people, sadly, may believe that they have a good “news diet” when, in fact, their exposure is highly selective and based on what their friends are likely to share. It’s rarely a well-rounded sampling of important news coverage. And much of it is likely to be opinion and punditry rather than actual news reporting. Further, what they see in their feeds is designed less to increase their awareness of the world and more to keep their eyes on the social media platform.

“The business model for the dominant platforms depends on keeping users engaged online,” according to a recent story. “Content that prompts hot emotion tends to succeed at generating clicks and shares, and that’s what the platforms’ algorithms tend to promote. Lies go viral more quickly than true statements, research shows” (Bazelon, 2020, p 31).

Social media offers us the illusion of news literacy, but what it really delivers is a fog of feel-good half-truths, a half-shuttered window on the world.

And our social media overreliance tempts us to make pronouncements about the world, about journalism, when we really don’t know what we’re talking about. I hear this all the time: “Why isn’t the media covering this?” people ask suspiciously, when, in fact, journalists have covered the story in question—their work just never popped up on a particular person’s social media account (or the rest of the world isn’t devoting as much attention to it).

This is just one of the sad, all-too-familiar outcomes of what we know as the “News Finds Me” perception, or NFM: When I start to believe that whatever news I see on my social media feed is sufficient and comprehensive, my overreliance leads to the feeling that I am more informed than I actually am. However, people with high NFM perceptions are actually less knowledgeable about or interested in political topics and may also be less motivated to vote (Gil de Zuñiga & Diehl, 2019). It also has been linked, in a limited way, to political cynicism (Song et al., 2019). Further, people who rely heavily on their social media feeds are more susceptible to tabloid news and misinformation (Chadwick et al., 2018).

And it is arguably disastrous for the vast amount of important journalism being produced every day. If people with high NFM perceptions feel no need to make an effort to find any of it, they are even more likely to confidently spout ill-informed judgments about the news that they do not see. News literacy, in other words, is often the missing link in media ethics. It’s why I devoted an entire chapter in my textbook to the idea of becoming a responsible media consumer (Plaisance, 2020).

Overreliance on social media feeds is a problem for our news literacy.

Source: Andrew Mantarro/Unsplash

There are important moral reasons to resist the cycle of false confidence on social media and to actually seek out good journalism. It was Aristotle who articulated the moral obligation to cultivate good character so that we may contribute to society as virtuous citizens. Among the duties that philosopher W.D. Ross said we all have was the duty for self-improvement.

A key component of good citizenship is making an effort to be well-informed. There are other, perhaps less-obvious moral considerations when we think about our news literacy. Philosopher Shannon Vallor, in her 2016 book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, proposes a series of 12 “technomoral values” that we should try to cultivate in ourselves; three, in particular, are relevant to the problem of poor news literacy and social media:

• Humility, or acknowledging what we don’t know (p. 125). While Vallor focuses primarily on the danger of presuming we can master our environments, the arrogance often cultivated by low news literacy also points to the value of approaching the world beyond our own bubbles with humility. She describes this virtue as “a reasoned, critical but hopeful assessment of our abilities and creative powers, combined with a healthy respect for the unfathomed complexities of the environments in which our powers operate and to which we will always be vulnerable” (p. 127).
• Empathy, or compassionate concern for others (p. 132). Some of the best journalism invites us to consider the unfamiliar; regularly seeking this out helps us exercise our empathetic “muscles.” Vallor sees empathy as “a cultivated openness to being morally moved to caring action by the emotions of other members of our technosocial world” (p. 133). She continues: “The moral need for more human empathy is not a novelty of the digital age. But the need is growing, not just because some new habits of the information society might deplete or inhibit empathy, but because the increasingly networked and interdependent nature of the human family entails that we shall find ourselves exposed to ever more circumstances that seem to call for it” (p. 138).
• Perspective, or the ability to “hold onto the moral whole” (p. 149). The self-involvement encouraged by our social media lives “can make our perspective seem suffocatingly small,” she says. It’s important for us to consider “secular techniques of narrative and artistic expression as ways of stretching our sense of the moral whole; of seeing and ‘holding in view’ more of the important relations, obligations, and interdependencies between ourselves and others; of conceiving and feeling the moral meaning of others’ needs, desires and interests alongside our own” (p. 150).

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Media ethics debates typically focus on what it means to be responsible media producers. But we should increasingly be concerned about the other side of that coin: what it takes for us all to be responsible consumers.