Trust has been brought up a lot lately, especially in the context of our digital lives and the real-life implications of our online activities.
There’s no doubt that people have become increasingly susceptible to conspiracy theories. And, opinion and fact have seemingly morphed into one powerful tool for preying on emotions.
But who is responsible for fixing this information crisis? Is it up to us to educate ourselves or does a massive media intervention need to happen?
Let’s dive into this problem area.
How to navigate trust in the internet era
What’s next for news?
According to Pew Research, experts are pretty evenly divided on what the future holds for online narratives.
The 51% of respondents who said that things wouldn’t get better, say the fake news landscape preys on our survival instincts, and humanity’s manipulators will use new tools to take advantage of our natural desire for convenience and comfort — you know, our fear of change.
Others say our brains just weren’t built to handle change on the scale of what we’ve experienced in the past two decades. These respondents predicted the future information landscape would be overcrowded with false information, making it more difficult to find trustworthy sources.
10 Tricks for spotting “fake news”
Read Now ►The 49% of hopeful experts believe technology might fix the problems it caused in the first place, predicting better methods of weeding out fake stories and promoting quality reporting.
A Vox discussion from earlier this year looks at the role of Facebook and fake news in the 2016 election. In it, Brooke Binkowski of Snopes brings up a good point. She says that everyone was so quick to bring up the failure of the media, when we, as a society have failed journalism.
So, perhaps it is a matter of giving more funding to investigative projects and quality outlets, reviving the victims of pivot to video.
Binkowski also says that quality news organizations have hurt themselves by publishing articles based on Twitter gossip or other unchecked sources.
There’s also the fact that public trust in the media overall has eroded. So, whether NPR and the New York Times continue to push out quality news, will people increasingly just write them off as fake news?
Are we responsible for identifying fake news ourselves?
The reason we even pose the question, “should trust matter on the internet?” is, it seems that making clear distinctions between informational sources was once common sense.
For example, citing someone’s blog as a primary source is generally a no-no.
But, is it elitist to assume that people know this?
There are plenty of resources available for students; just about every university has a page dedicated to evaluating information on the internet. Filtering questions like: is news coming from an established institution? Are sources clear and documented? Does that information reflect bias? should maybe be part of the social media experience.
The Brookings Institute report dove into how we can combat fake news as a group effort. Their report mentions that fake news “fools” American adults about 75% of the time.
And recent data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that less than 25% of Americans feel social media channels do a good job separating fact and fiction. Yet, people get a good chunk of their news from social media and continue to share misinformation.
What do we do about this problem?
The Brookings report recommends that news organizations focus their efforts on quality journalism that builds trust and stresses the importance of calling out misinformation as they see it.
They also say that technology companies should focus on developing better ways to identify and remove harmful, fake content and that online users should learn to be skeptical about what they read online.
The point is, in an era of fake news, maybe we should revisit these research basics when it comes to informing our understanding of the world.
Trust matters, but we all need to work together if we want to improve the digital news landscape.
