
With so many media sources these days — commercial television, social media, old-fashioned newspapers — some are bound to be more reliable in terms of accuracy than others.
Researchers have found that people who believe climate change is a conspiracy get most of their news and information about current events from social and commercial media sources.
After Donald Trump was reelected president, chief executive of Meta Mark Zuckerberg fired his company’s social media fact-checkers, with the intention of replacing them with a “community notes” format like the one used by Elon Musk’s platform X. The model relies on corrections added by users to posts that are false or misleading, Mark Andrejevic, a media professor at Monash University’s School of Media, Film, and Journalism, wrote in The Conversation.
The model has been described by Musk as “citizen journalism, where you hear from the people. It’s by the people, for the people.”
However, for this to work, the “citizen journalists,” as well as their readers, must value accuracy, accountability and “good-faith deliberation,” Andrejevic said.
“This is why it’s been so interesting to hear in recent weeks how social media is actually turning away from factchecking: because they’re pretending – and I think it’s a pretence – that they’re being more hands-off; but they’re not hands-off, because they build these algorithms to pump stuff into our feeds,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “Algorithms do that based only on commercial values: is it viral, will it get engagement, will it get attention? Not at all on: is it important, accurate or useful for participating in democracy?”
New research by Andrejevic and his team, conducted in partnership with Essential Media, looked into what those who use social media think of everyday civic values.
For their research report, “Mapping civic disposition, media use and affective polarisation,” the team reviewed existing studies on political polarisation and social cohesion, conducted 10 focus groups and compiled a scale of civic values. The scale aimed to measure people’s levels of trust in the government and media institutions, along with their openness to considering perspectives of others that challenge their own.
The researchers conducted a survey of 2,046 Australians, asking them how strong their belief was in “a common public interest.” They also asked how important it was to them for Australians to be informed about political issues and for civics to be taught in schools.
They inquired about the respondents’ news sources: commercial television, commercial radio, social media, newspapers or non-commercial media.
More than a third of those who relied mainly on commercial television and radio for most of their news agreed with the statement, “fluctuations in the climate are the result of natural cycles that take place regardless of human activity,” reported The Guardian.
A quarter of respondents who primarily got their news from social media believed that the climate crisis was a conspiracy. On the other hand, those who did not believe in climate change conspiracies more often got their information from the public broadcasters SBS and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Just two percent who relied on public radio for their news and six percent for whom public television was their main source believed climate change was a conspiracy.
“We found people who rely on social media for news score significantly lower on a civic values scale than those who rely on newspapers and non-commercial broadcasters such as the ABC,” Andrejevic wrote in The Conversation. “By contrast, people who rely on non-commercial radio scored highest on the civic values scale.”
Those who relied mostly on non-commercial radio had scores that were 11 percent higher than respondents who relied on social media and 12 percent higher than those who used commercial television as their primary news source. People who relied mainly on commercial radio had the lowest scores.
People who mostly read newspapers, watched non-commercial television and looked to online news aggregators scored higher than those who were reliant on commercial broadcasting and social media.
The survey found that civic value scores went up as the number of media sources people used on a daily basis increased.
“The point of the civic values scale we developed is to highlight the fact that the values people bring to news about the world is as important as the news content,” Andrejevic explained in The Conversation. “For example, most people in the United States have likely heard about the violence of the attack on the Capitol protesting Trump’s loss in 2020. That Trump and his supporters can recast this violent riot as ‘a day of love’ is not the result of a lack of information. It is, rather, a symptom of people’s lack of trust in media and government institutions and their unwillingness to confront facts that challenge their views. In other words, it is not enough to provide people with accurate information. What counts is the mindset they bring to that information.”
So do social media platforms cultivate lower civic values or just cater to them?
“We don’t have the evidence to answer that,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “It could be that social media just attracts people who score lower on these questions; and people who listen to ABC radio tend to score higher because they seek that out.”
Andrejevic pointed out that the long-term concern of social media critics has been that the platforms favor virality and sensationalism over thoughtfulness and accuracy, which does not help democracy.
“Free speech is based on the idea that people have been educated enough in the values of civil society to be willing to engage in good faith discussion, but what you see online is that doesn’t happen at all,” Andrejevic told Guardian Australia. “We wanted to see how the different media actually cater to scoring higher or lower on this set of values that we think are important for democracy.”
According to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, social media is more about “mocking perceived opponents” and bonding with those who share similar views than meaningful engagement, Andrejevic wrote in The Conversation.
“Platforms want to wash their hands of the fact-checking process, because it is politically fraught. Their owners claim they want to encourage the free flow of information,” Andrejevic said. “However, their fingers are on the scale. The algorithms they craft play a central role in deciding which forms of expression make it into our feeds and which do not.
“It’s disingenuous for them to abdicate responsibility for the content they choose to pump into people’s news feeds, especially when they have systematically created a civically challenged media environment,” Andrejevic added.
This article was reposted from EcoWatch.
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