Do you believe that social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?

In my personal opinion, I believe that due to the constant improvements of today’s technology, social media has definitely gotten the news out there a lot quicker than before, but it’s more decreased the quality of the news and the information that it’s spreading globally. People are now constantly looking at social media as a reliable source of information whether it’s news on what’s going on in the community, crime or news related to sports.

 A great example of social media decreasing the quality of today’s news is sports. High school students and teenagers specifically aren’t watching television as much, reading newspapers and listening to the radios to get reliable information. They are constantly going onto websites, forums, blogs etc to get their information about their sport teams or what’s going on in the business such as team trades and free agent signings because they think it’s more reliable. I personally used to keep going on websites, team forums and links where a majority of them were rumours. The problem with going onto websites for news is a lot of them are from a “source” or “person with the knowledge within the organization”.

Another reason I believe social media has more decreased rather than increase the quality of today’s news is the way social media has at times taken information out of contexts and put out false information. People often misinterpret information completely different than others and they could mislead other people through twitter, facebook and youtube. People who misinterpret information now can now go onto the internet and start spreading false information they believe is reliable information. The next person to misinterpret what he or she has read can now put in their own input what they think is good information and the cycle continues until the actual fact is put out there.

I really believe that social media has definitely gotten information out there a lot faster but at the same time it’s gotten only part of the story out. Which is why I also believe that social media has decreased the quality of news and information in a way.