When social media began, it was a bubble of information. It was a place in which a person could connect with another, reaching through space and time to interact with others, share opinions, stay in touch and find others who shared your same way of thinking— or expand and interact with those who didn’t. You were able to gather knowledge and ideas, but also build on your own. Since its start in the early 2000s, though, it’s begun to mold itself into a new entity. One in which opinions are shared as facts, spread virally and anyone with a differing position is seen as a target to instigate disagreements.
Nowadays we get our entertainment, news, memes and hot family gossip through our social media platform of choice, and sites like Facebook and Twitter have become thoroughfares for our main sources for news. In less than two decades with social media in our lives, our generation has gone from laughing at memes of funny cats to relying on them for our primary source of important information. While a large portion of U.S. adults say they get their news from their smartphone, there has also been a shift in the scale of distrust and questions of accuracy being shared. Recent studies over the last few months now show that more than half of Americans do not trust the news they see on social media. Does the level of distrust around news have anything to do with the platforms they’re being shared on? Social media is broken, and with that, the trust readers once had in them. With such a high percentage of mistrust, we should now ask if there’s anything that could be done to rebuild that trust.
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