At some point or another in the last decade, you’ve probably heard about fake news and the havoc it’s causing.
With the emergence of new media technologies, including the rise of smart devices and social media, the creation and distribution of content has skyrocketed far beyond what anyone could have imagined before the 21st century. Media audiences have gone from being “passive” (watching TV or listening to the radio) to “active” consumers, meaning they participate in the creation and distribution of content (making Youtube videos or tweeting). Media scholars call this activity “user-generated content,” or UGC for short. Social media platforms are UGC-plaforms, meaning that the content that you engage with is made and posted by your peers. Platforms like Youtube and TikTok that show you content made by people like you, for people like you. Passive consumption still exists of course, although the dominant format has shifted from cable TV to streaming services.
On top of pretty much anyone being able to compose a tweet or run a blog, the sheer amount of information and content online is unprecedented. The Social Shepherd reports that over 500 million tweets are posted per day and Brandwatch states that over 500 million Instagram stories are posted, accompanying the 95 million feed posts every day. Additionally, according to Wallaroo media, TikTok has over 1 billion active users, with 82% of those users having created and posted content on the platform at some point.
What this means is there is essentially never-ending content for any social media user to consume. Especially on platforms like TikTok where the main function is to show you a never-ending stream of content that you’ve never seen before, but are probably going to find interesting.
Is there such a thing as too much content? This tsunami of content constantly roaring towards you can be overwhelming, which might actually help fake news spread. According to the Scientific American, this information overload is influencing how and why we see certain content.
“Viewing and producing blogs, videos, tweets and other units of information called memes have become so cheap and easy that the information marketplace is inundated. Unable to process all this material, we let our cognitive biases decide what we should pay attention to. These mental shortcuts influence which information we search for, comprehend, remember and repeat to a harmful extent.”
They describe the results as “confus[ing] popularity with quality” since it’s easier to copy what those around us online are doing. Essentially, “if everybody else is talking about it, it must be important.”
And if there are thousands of posts available at your fingertips at all times, it becomes nearly impossible to spend time fact-checking each one. So, we default on trusting our internet circles and people we follow online. If they think it’s true… then it must be true?
So, is this why there is so much “fake news” circulating? Because anyone can not only create content, but also disseminate it across hundreds of thousands of screens within minutes? Scholars Jones-Hang, Mortensen, and Liu (2021) discuss how all of these factors culminate in one thing: the importance of assessing and analyzing the accuracy of information being disseminated.
Fake News as the Problem
As a media literacy advocate, Sharing Isn’t Caring wants to quickly remind everyone just how prolific fake news is online.
For example, a Pew Research Center report from 2016 stated that 71% of U.S. adults claimed to see fake political news and two-in-three American adults (64%) believe that fake news and fabricated information online is causing confusion about current issues and events. Additionally, BuzzFeed found that some fake news stories went more viral and reached more users than actual news stories in 2016.
Media Literacy as an Answer
Can media literacy be an answer to this problem? Let’s first define “media literacy”. We surveyed three different peer-reviewed, academic articles published at different points in the last 20 years to see their definitions of the term.
Jones-Hang, Mortensen, and Liu (2021) define media literacy as an audience-centred solution that is the audience’s ability to “critically consume, question, and analyze information.” Livingstone (2004) describes a skills-based approach to media literacy as well, point to four reasons why more media literacy is needed:
Access (internet communication technologies, or ICT’s, are more prolific than ever)
Analysis (from social media platforms to news oragnizations, complicated factors of biases, technologies, motives, and representations require deep analysis)
Evaluation (with the fast-paced, constantly changing media landscape, critical evaluation of these cultural, social, economic, and political contexts is key)
Content Creation (the media environment has only become more complicated with the shift from passive to active consumption)
Lastly, Wallis and Buckingham (2013) define media literacy as a possibility for audience empowerment. To give audience’s opportunity to use new media platforms and technologies for truly civic and democratic means. As a measure of what an active citizen is.
There are many different definitions of what media literacy is. Sharing Isn’t Caring takes all of them into consideration when creating our content. The easiest way we can describe it is being more critical when consuming content online. Not just agreeing or believing that everything you see online is the truth.
Some studies, like this one by Jeong, Cho, and Hwang (2012) claim that a more media literate audience-member is more likely to approach online or news media with skepticism and caution. Our hope is that the tools and tips that we provide on our platforms can encourage our audience and others beyond to be just that little bit more critical when they’re scrolling online.
As optimistic as we can be, fake news and purposely misleading information is a massive problem that cannot simply be resolved by everyone questioning everything.
Jones-Hang, Mortensen, and Liu (2021) acknowledge this, stating that as fake news becomes more and more realistic and perpetrated by certain voices, either those with large audiences or social, economic, or political power, it becomes a lot more complicated than audiences having critical thinking skills. In fact, lots of the platforms we find ourselves frequenting are playing significant roles in the rabbit-holes of conspiracies or fake news tangents that are wreaking so much havoc, but that’s a topic for another blog.
However, regardless of this undeniable complexity, critical consumption and media literacy is one way to slow down the virulity and spread of fake news.
As we discussed earlier in this blog, fake news and misinformation thrives on an inundated, crowded, and fast-paced media environment. The more something is shared, the quicker something goes viral, the more eyes it will reach before anyone can say “hold up, is this even true?”
By reaching the root of the problem and making someone think before they share, maybe we can slow this process down.
Sharing Isn’t Caring is a University project run by Simon Fraser University Communication undergraduate Genevieve Cheng. If you have comments or queries about our content, you can contact the project at any time.
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