A few months ago, I saw an interesting development on my Facebook homepage. Together with updates about a friend’s marriage and photos from the party the night before, was a link to the latest on the Euro Debt Crisis from the Washington Social Reader. As I went to the link, I saw myself reading not only the article on the debt crisis, but also several other articles that interested me. As I was still logged on to my Facebook page, my friends online got feeds telling them that I had ‘liked’ some of these articles, which in turn led to several of them reading these articles as well. Over the last two months, I have learnt of some of the most significant happenings globally through the Washington Social Reader on Facebook- right from Salman Rushdie backing out of the Jaipur Literary Festival to the planned introduction of Starbucks into India.
Social Media is increasingly gaining importance as a news-distribution platform. To quote from a recent study by the Pew Research Centre, “If searching for news was the most important development of the past decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next”.
While a close to 30% of visits on news sites come from referrals on Google News, the proportion of visitors from Facebook, although smaller is growing[i]. Digg.com is a website created exclusively for this purpose, allowing people to vote stories up or down. It now even has a feature integrating Facebook and Digg. Indeed, letting friends guide you when choosing news articles makes for a useful and effective filter to sort and get customized news, without loss in privacy.
Besides, news shares, another growing way to get personalized news is through, data monitoring by websites. Google, for instance, has a wealth of information gained from its various sites- Google Search, Gmail, You Tube, Google+ etc. This database of information is only likely to get deeper, as Google looks combines this information across its various portals for individuals in its new privacy policy. With such large amounts of information at hand, Google can provide a completely customized search experience on all fronts, just as it plans to do, including through news.
Facebook, again has a wealth of information about its 800m plus users- right from the sports they follow to their current location. It chooses to share much of this information with Google’s rival search engine Bing, and there is a distinct possibility of this information again being used for a similar customized search platform as the one Google is introducing.
There is an erupting debate over the ethicality of such customization and the privacy invasion involved. Much is being said, for instance, about Google, going back on ‘Do no evil’. However, strong arguments can be made to say that such customization has both benefits and drawbacks for users, and a fair analysis of the issue would warrant for a much larger debate.
Besides, the sharing and customization of news, social media has greatly influenced the creators and the reporters of news. Now, it is no longer just the journalists who are reporting news. Ordinary citizens too are reporting, and often, in live time. For instance, the news of Osama’s death was leaked on Twitter, as Shohaib Akhtar, an IT consultant from Abbottabad tweeted live about the raid, unknowing, at least initially, that the raid indeed was for Osama’s capture. (Exhibit 1) In a more recent incident in India, Twitter has been the platform for ‘Shahrukh Khan-Sirish Kunder Slapgate’, as much publicized by the media.
In a recent paper[ii], authors argued that Twitter is more of a news media than a social network. After studying 41.7 user profiles, they concluded that over 85% of the trending topics tend to be in the nature of headline or persistent news.
They also emphasise the power or retweeting (the practice of tweeting someone else’s tweet again so that it can be seen by retweeter’s followers), which allows news to spread very fast and also makes twitter ideal for breaking news. They show statistically that a tweet that is retweeted by an individual with 100 followers, has on an average a 1000 additional recipients (Exhibit 2).
Such creation and sharing of news by common citizens, started with the emergence of blogs in the late 1990s. The growth of blogs thereafter has been exponential, and as of February 2011, there were over 156 million blogs in existence[iii].
One of the initial incidents through which the significance of blogging came into light was when the U.S. Senate majority leader Trent Lott, made some remarks favouring U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond. By many bloggers, this was seen as implicit approval of racial segregation, a policy that had been favoured by Thurmond in his presidential elections several decades prior. Bloggers highlighted this and even produced documents and interviews in support of this. The media initially took no note of Lott’s comments and paid attention later, only after several bloggers brought up the issue. Eventually the issue took such a scale that Lott has to resign as leader of the majority.
While initially mainstream media was apprehensive of and even resistant towards the growth of such bloggers, their attitude has changed over the years. Several such as Wall Street Journal and the Economist have incorporated blogs successfully into their publications for real time analysis of news. It is also common to find publications inviting contributions in the form of videos, pictures etc from their readers. The pioneer in this, was the Huffington Post, launched in May 2005, which used a ‘hybrid’ approach to reporting, incorporating articles from journalists, bloggers and links to other news sites, all on the same platform.
One of the major issues highlighted with relying on news reported by citizens on social media is that it is hard to verify the accuracy of the same. There have been several instances of incorrect news being circulated on Twitter. The team from breakingnews.com found that several photos and videos being circulated about the East Coast earthquake in the U.S.A last year were false. Several versions of a particular video, that was widely circulated, tried to pass off images shot during the Tokyo earthquake as NYC buildings shaking in the earthquake. Again, several rumours were circulated on Twitter, such as the one that the Washington Monument was leaning post the earthquake, which were later proven entirely false.
Indeed, it is a challenge to verify the authenticity of any information posted exclusively on the social media and use it for news broadcasting. Photographs can be examined for any visible indications to the location claimed. The weather in a particular place can be looked up to see whether it corresponds to the weather on a particular date as seen in the photo (as quoted by Mohamed Yehia of BBC Arabic, in the Economist issue date 9th July, 2011). Despite such methods, however, a shadow of doubt may always remain.
Verifying the accuracy of tweets posted on Twitter is even more difficult, and the journalists largely use Twitter as a means to gauge public interest, occasionally incorporating these public views into their articles.
Despite such shortcomings, however, it is clear that social media, has carved out a grater role for the public in journalism, impacting both the user experience as well as the content creation aspect of news. From the user perspective, it has both empowered individuals-giving them a platform to speak up as also made the user experience better, allowing them to read news customized to their interests, although arguably at the cost of some privacy. From the content creation side, it has had an impact with the users challenging some news posted by the media, offering their opinion on a variety of issues as well as sharing some news in live time.
According to a 2009 study by eMarketer, by 2013 nearly 155m users in the USA will consume user-generated content, up by 34% from 2008. In reality, these numbers will only look bigger. In a nutshell, social media has made news a more interactive process, more as a back and forth between the media and the public, instead of one-way communication.
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