Social Media and News - Where to Draw the Line

 

Social media has fundamentally changed the global culture in a number of ways, but its greatest change comes with how we as a society consume news. Now more than ever, the news is more readily accessible to the general public, and the public has more opportunities to directly interact with journalists and news outlets thanks to the rise of social media on the global stage. Social media has become incredibly popular as a news platform for many Americans, with roughly half of American adults getting their news frequently through these websites. What's more, younger Americans are even more likely to get their news through social media platforms, with 76% of Americans aged 18-29 saying they primarily get their news through these platforms (Forman-Katz & Matsa, 2022). Yet despite this mass acceptance of social media platforms as news sites, these platforms and the companies that run them avoid the usual regulations that are expected of more traditional news organizations. This has allowed social media platforms to become a hotbed for third-party fake news and misinformation, and this has caused many to reconsider how matters of falsehood on social media should be managed. Just how much should government organizations step in to regulate these websites, and should social media be held to the same standard as professional news organizations? This post hopes to offer two arguments on what can be done to curtail the spread of fake news on social media.

(From the Pew Research Center, 2023)

The arguments regarding fake news and the solutions to them ultimately come down to a matter of where the problem stems from. For Southern Methodist University Technology Law Reviewer Dallas Flick, the issues surrounding the rise of misinformation stem not from Social Media platforms themselves, but from a shift in the market power of larger, more polarized news outlets (Flick, 2017, pp. 398-399). Flick holds that local and long-form news has lost much of its power in the U.S. due to a smaller market share, while much larger and more partisan news networks have grown to encompass more of the modern news landscape. This presents a problem, as the more these news organizations grow, the less likely it is for them to hold themselves accountable for the information they disseminate. Furthermore, this lack of local and long-form news from smaller entities has led to greater mistrust from the public who see the media as a handful of large corporations without their own interests in mind. To combat this, Flick takes the indirect approach of establishing a nominal levy towards news outlets with substantial market share value. The funds from this levy would then be redistributed to smaller, local news efforts. By pulling funding from larger news outlets and redistributing it towards more local efforts, the impact of fake news from larger news organizations becomes lessened due to less funding for distribution and greater accountability. Furthermore, Flick argues that not only will these organizations have more agenda-setting power, but news audiences will have more faith in the credibility of journalism (2017, pp. 398-400).

Flick's plan is an indirect solution to fake news. It is one that focuses on using the invisible hand of the market to curtail the dissemination of misinformation by reducing the platform of news media that use misinformation to gain traction. Yet for some, this indirect approach is insufficient in truly tackling the issue of fake news, and it will take far more interaction from governing bodies to truly make a dent in misinformation on social media platforms. Duke University professor of public policy Philip M. Napoli sees this not just as a matter of the free market, but one of dire concern to public interest, and he believes that the only true way to curtail misinformation is for greater regulation of social media at nearly every level (Napoli, 2019). Social media companies have long used their distinction as "tech companies" to avoid major regulation from government bodies, and this has allowed these platforms to present false and misleading information without repercussions. Napoli believes that if this does not change, then misinformation may grow too prevalent to truly stop, and so there must be a concerted effort to fight against this. To that end, Napoli presents a new framework for how governing bodies approach media regulation at all levels, from self-regulation within the social media companies themselves to a collectivist reinterpretation of the First Amendment which will allow the government the ability to take greater action in the face of misinformation which is potentially detrimental to the health of American democracy (2019, pp. 163-198).

Of course, these are just two potential solutions to the matter of misinformation, and the question of just how much regulation should be implemented on social media websites remains a matter of debate. For another view on this, take a look at the Al Jazeera video below, where correspondents go over their views on social media regulation (Al Jazeera, 2020).

(Should Social Media Be More Regulated? from Al Jazeera, Feb 13, 2020)

References

Al Jazeera. (2020, February 13). Should Social Media Be More Regulated? | Inside Story [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/-QaXVetsuIg

Flick, D. (2017). Combatting fake news: alternatives to limiting social media misinformation and rehabilitating quality journalism. SMU Science and Technology Law Review, 20(2), 375-406.

Forman-Katz, N., & Matsa, K. E. (2022, November 14). News platform fact sheet. Pew Research Center's Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/#panel-b39b851c-e417-48ef-9b10-93ee21a0030e

Napoli, P. M. (2019). Social Media and the Public Interest : Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age. Columbia University Press.