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Social Media and Society ISBN: 978-93-93166-41-8 For verification of this chapter, please visit on http://www.socialresearchfoundation.com/books.php#8 |
Social Media and Fake News Dilemma, Youth perspective on News Credibility |
Barkatullah Rawnaq
Research Scholar
Extension and Communication
The Maharaja Sayajiro University of Baroda
Vadodara, Gujrat, India
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DOI: Chapter ID: 17507 |
This is an open-access book section/chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Technology has changed our way of living and influencing
different aspect of our lives, it has changed the way we communicate, doing
business and other sectors such as health and transport. Embracing the new
technology and adapting our way of living with that is now inevitable, we don’t
have any choice but to embrace and impellent the new technology and its
advancement in our daily life especially in communication. With the invention of
telephone by Alexander Graham in 19th century one of the corner
stone or the earliest technology feats in the communication made a land mark
and achieved. After that huge invention, people only by picking up the phone
can communicate and build relation to each other that include from their
closest friend in neighboring till relatives and people in far distance in
different parts of the world. It helped people despite communicating to each
other, building up relation and business, pave the way for a faster a better
communication as well. (TACSM, 2019) As
human beings are living in the age of information and the advancement in
technology has caused and brought a rapid changes and revolution in the media
industry and the way people communicate and it has a huge impact on the media
and its way of disseminating the information. With all the technological
advancement the media has been replaced by up to date and most advance and
sophisticated and along with this technological advancement media industry growing
rapidly, faster and the information revolution had made the information process
faster, speedy and rapid and information can obviously be sent in different
parts and corner of the world in a flash. Communication is investable part of human beings life as
human beings are social beings. Communication and communicating to each other,
passing information and disseminating that through the history of human being
has witnessed ups and down on its way of developing. From the first and earlier
types of communication such as vocal communication, signals and pigeons and
simple text messages to its advancing age such internet, mobile, computer,
audio and video call, chats platform and other advanced technological
communication. (Khattak & Nasir, 2012) Communication is not a choice it is a necessity and
inevitable part of human beings life and technological advancement in
communication field has been gained through the time to make it more efficient
and accessible. During
the 19th and early 20th century, the radio and television were also developed
and with the development of World Wide Web (WWW) and interne in the late 20th
century, the communication way reaches its land mark path and changed the way
of communication at all. Social
and Online networking website such as Face book, Twitter and Instagram have
rapidly changed the way people communicate and communication channels to a
rapid and instant communication. Through
YouTube people can search anything at anytime or
any moment, it has provided immense sources and ways of communication in
different field. Years
back, mainstream news media namely Newspaper, Radio, TV and Magazines were the
major source of news for the audience and these mainstream channels were
enjoying a huge support by the audience and also the professional journalist of
that time were the only source and disseminator of news and information, but
with the rise of New Media this privilege for mainstream media came to halt and
now the audience has many option of news an even they themselves become the source
of news (Bruns et al., 2012). With
the rise of the Internet era, traditional media faced many challenges in
transmitting the messages to their audience. With the current changes in news
dissemination, the gatekeeper role of writer has been undermined by the emerge
of new, news producers which are the active citizens or active internet users.
Active citizens or so-called citizen journalists or no more waiting for merely
source of news as they themselves are not mere a news consumer. The shift of
news consumption to online and social media platforms has disrupted traditional
business models of journalism, causing many news outlets to shrink or close,
while others struggle to adapt to new market realities. Current
scenario and changes in the media landscape brought the challenge of fake news
with itself, it rises the concern about the public and audience ability and
vulnerability to combat and come out with fake news especially in the current
era of infinite source of news which has been here due to new shift in media
paradigm. New media technology and rise of social media provide the scope and
challenges of the credibility of the source of news which nowadays audience are
facing and heavily relaying on heuristic and social norms and cues in case to
be able to determine the credibility of news and information they receive and
consume. The issue of the credibility of news leads to further and bigger
challenge which the issue of journalism role and credibility at all, because
the public may shift to other source of news and may not believe in
journalistic practices any more due to fake news and not availability of tool
and methods to detect the fake news (Mele et al. 2017). Technology
and new media somehow offer the way to mitigate the challenges of fake news and
misinformation as an example the recent initiative which has been taken by Face
book in fact checking and delivering warning before people share the disputed
or misleading information can be a clear example of technology intervention. Despite
taking some measures to combat and curb fake news, still the persuasiveness of
these methods and measure are seen not very much applicable and generalizable.
Through deep research in this regard and understanding the cause and effect of
fake news, media professional and researcher of media and journalism can play
vital role in adding values and news measures in curbing and dealing with fake
news. Advancements
in technology provides a breeding ground and wide scope for internet users and
news consumer to become content creator on different online and digital
platforms, this empowerment brought changes in news consumption. The
overarching implication of this unprecedented opportunity on media credibility
has continued to reverberate among researchers, media practitioners, and media
users. Consequently,
the growing spate of fake news, fabricated news reports and hate speech have
called into question the credibility of new media, prompting a handful of
empirical investigations and research into audience assessment and perception
of the credibility of new media. References: 1. Bruns, A.,
Highfield, T., & Lind, R. A. (2012). Blogs, twitter, and breaking news: The
prod usage of citizenjournalism.https://snurb.info/files/2012/Blogs,%20Twitter,%20and%20Breaking%20News.pdf 2. Khattak, A. W., & Nasir, M. (2012).
The Role of Information Technology in Media Industry. Online Journal of
Communication and Media Technologies, 2(3), 166-183. https://doi.org/10.29333/ojcmt/2395 3. Mele, et al. 2017"Combating Fake
News: An Agenda for Research and Action."https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/combating-fake-news-agenda-research-and-action#citation 4. Mistura AdebusolaSalaudeen. (2022) From Personal
to Professional: Exploring the Influences on Journalists’ Evaluation of Citizen
Journalism Credibility. Journalism Practice 16:10,
pages 2040-2063. 5. The Technological Advancement in
Communication and Society Media. (2019, Aug 19). Retrieved fromhttps://studymoose.com/the-technological-advancement-in-communication-and-society-media-essay 6. https://docplayer.net/23206827-The-development-of-journalism-in-the-face-of-social-media.html
7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2020.1837461 |