Challenges Brought by Social Media on Politics

Social Media
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February 21, 2021
Social media has been one of the most important innovations in the past century. It allowed for the better dissemination of knowledge and current events that is accessible anytime and anywhere. This improves not only the dissemination of knowledge, but also the overall general response towards situations especially for ‘emergency situations’. However, social media also has its own disadvantages. Compared to other platforms, news, information, and opinion could be shared by almost any user regardless of the appropriateness and ‘truthfulness’ of the situation. In this article, the author would like to focus on some of the most pressing disadvantages that must be addressed in line with social media use – accountability. It is the author’s belief that despite the expedience and the greater accessibility to news information brought about by social media, this is also subject to the downside which results in the greater proliferation of fake news.
Fake News and Accountability
As stated earlier the ‘liberality’ of social media creates a disadvantage wherein people become exposed to conflicting information about news events thereby reducing ‘belief’ in such news. Whether it be totally fake or somehow taken out of context, these false pieces of information could lead to varying the perception about the same subject matter. According to one study conducted by Watson (2019), they found out that about 52% of Americans who use social media believes that they are ‘regularly’ exposed to fake news for every single day that they use social media. In contrast, only 9% of the respondents believe that they were not exposed to fake news while 34% believed that they are occassionaly exposed to the same. In another study done by Ognyanova et al. (2020), the authors have noted that the belief that one is constantly exposed to false information in mass media creates a feeling of distrust towards the said medium. In other words, the constant exposure to false pieces of information suggests an overall decline in the confidence of people towards news taken from social media.
Although constant exposure to fake news can generally lead to a decline in people’s trust towards news derived from the said medium, the effects of false information towards propaganda and mind conditioning is still apparent. One example of this could be seen in how propaganda is spread in the Phillipine setting. According to one news article ...