Click here to subscribe today or Login.
When I wake up each morning, I have the same routine.
I get out of bed, take a shower, brush my teeth and check my Facebook timeline.
It’s just the first of many check-ins I do throughout the day. In addition to the posts from friends, I am finding an increasing number of articles on politics and current events.
While social media offers millennials a beneficial way to communicate with others across generations and even international borders, it poses a serious threat to the flow of accurate news stories and responsible editorial commentary.
According to a recent survey by the American Press Institute, 88 percent of millennials obtain their news on a daily basis strictly from their social media accounts. The “news source” is comprised of friends who post articles and videos on their own time lines.
The news posts vary in nature and often reflect the political leanings of one’s friends. If conservative, the shared articles and videos are typically from FOX News, the Conservative Tribune and The Blaze. If liberal, the shared sources tend to originate from CNN, the Huffington Post and Vice News.
Although these news accounts offer the benefit of convenience for the user, they not only lack objectivity, but in some cases responsible coverage of foreign and domestic affairs. This is a problem for today’s young adults whose views are, and will continue to be, heavily shaped by peers.
To be sure, everyone’s political views are influenced by family and friends. But we are cheating ourselves if we adopt those views without questioning them. To be honest, I am just as guilty as any other millennial.
Since I go to a liberal college and I attended a liberal high school, most of my friends share liberal views. While other friends — and my family — are more conservative, I tend to ignore their views. Not only am I inundated with views from the liberal press, but why should I pay any attention to the conservative perspective if it only appears once for every 10 liberal postings? How can I not help but believe that news from liberal outlets is more worthy of my time?
The problem extends to other types of social media where millennials not only seek to give voice to their conservative or liberal views, but to create the news itself. One such site it Reddit, a “social news aggregation” website, where users can post their own views on news, politics and entertainment. Others users may choose to criticize or compliment a news post. Still others give a post an “up-vote” to increase its popularity on the website, or a “down-vote” to decrease its popularity.
The recent presidential election has shown how irresponsible social media has become as a news source with rumor and innuendo about the candidates. I fear that such irresponsible coverage will continue well into the future as more millennials will strive to prove the “other side” wrong by posting more and more of their own biased accounts.
The most effective way to put an end to the “social-media-as-news” insanity is for millennials to turn to a variety of mainstream outlets and scholarly publications. These are much more legitimate news sources because they are written and monitored by professionals.
Only then will the millennial generation stop accepting what we want to hear and begin reading, writing and thinking critically – and responsibly – about the issues that will inevitably affect our lives.