Social Media: Public Sphere for Interaction and Debate - Essay Sample

Introduction

Social media are popular public sites with millions of users who connect and interact digitally. The social media has been considered a public sphere because it is the contemporary public sphere where people come together, and hold discourses publicly. It is also social media where users are free to update their statutes, report events, discuss the event, and even debate on social issues. While individuals use social media, the groups, corporations, and government entities can use social media as a platform for discourses. Over the last three years, the number of debates on social media has increased significantly, but the social media has not reached the real of a public sphere because of the lack of social discourse over the social media. The media have professional codes of ethics with which they should comply. Any little ethical lapse can significantly erode the trust the public has on the news reported by the media. By examining the credibility of contents on social media, the author argues that while social media is a social platform, therefore, users should the media houses accountable for the contents they report.

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Social Media as a Public Sphere

Social media news is intended to influence social action. However, it has failed to influence social action because the users do not consider discourses in social media as honest. Most of the users do not engage in political action. The social media has been shrouded in false reporting. Most of the assertion is not fact-checked. For example, most of the events that are shared over social media are shared at a faced value without checking the veracity of such news. Most social, media users share the contents they find online without fact checking for the feat of online harassment. Those who criticize false information are harassed, forcing them to accept the false news and share them online as they find them without correcting the false information. Most of the people who read news online only engage with the people who hold politically similar opinions and block those who attempt to analyze the false information. It is difficult to hold social media accounts individually for the misinformation (Lazer et al, 2018). However, individuals have the onus of reporting to the central authorities any falsehood reporting over Social media by private and public entities.

Crowdsourcing and Misinformation

Social media crowdsources information. However, the information is user-generated content such as status posts, comments, videos, photos, and data in online interaction is never verified. Most of the fake news is trending because they are extreme cases and people are more thrilled by scandals. Media houses are more bent on winning clickthroughs, views, and shares, as opposed to broadcasting the truth. Instead of media houses fact checking, they choose to broadcast fake news. Pennycook and Rand (2019) argued that crowdsourced verification of the news source can help to check and reporting fake news. With the prevalence of misinformation, it is time for the audiences to know how to fact check instead of continuing to the consumer the fake news.

The most effective way to sort out facts is to check the credential of the authors. The authors should be authorized or specialists in the field about which the article is reporting. The reader should check if the author speaks with authority and accuracy on the subject matter. Secondly, the audience should first read the about us section to find the contact information of the websites to check facts if some falsehood is suspected (Teoh, 2018). The audience can also fact check by looking for bias in the article. All contents and links should be reported objectively instead of skewing the content to a particular perspective. It is also advisable to check out the cited sources. Most of the sources cited in articles are either blogs or commercial websites seeking to sell some produces. The reader must check all facts in the links before accepting the information as the gospel truth (Kahan, 2017). In some cases, the reader should interrogate the rules. Many fake and deceptive sites look like legitimate sites. Any sensational post is most likely biased posts. In some cases, the media used click baiting to attract a click. These exaggerated ad provocative titles and contents used emotional language to lure readers. Emotional language on a website should be a red flag for fake news.

Opinions: Professional and Popular, Who is Right?

Social media has been characterized as a place for happy interactions only such that any sad interaction is censured. Most of the sad contents are suspect but the happy contents are celebrated. However, the main reason why fake news is prominent is that it is free. Holding the media accountable today is challenging because fake news is free, and the threats of canceling a subscription are no longer tenable. Fake news is everywhere, accessible, and time more than authoritative journalism. Today, even a letter to the editors pointing out falsehood in the new is never read because of the multitude of correspondents to the editors. With editors overwhelmed with letters, it is easy for them to overlook serious credibility concerns (Kahan, 2017). Therefore, people turn to online comments because they are ubiquitous. Instead of calling out falsehood, the media consumers are vocal critics whose only place for ad nausea is the blogs and comments. Without accountability, constructive criticism is useless. Professionalism is right, but fake is popular. Professionalism would be costly because the new is authoritative, objective, and candid. However, the fake is subjective and biased. Social media is a public sphere but is less likely to yield the necessary public pressure required to demand accountability.

Lazy or Following the Popular Trend

With many people used to free things, free fake news sells more than the subscription-only news. The media companies without an adequate budget for the research and fact checking tend to have more loyal consumers than the subscription-only media that invest in checking and research. People are lazy to fast check, but their main limitation is the inability to pay for a validated information. This has led to the overreliance on false information that contributes to the trivialization of all news sources as misinformation. The traditional media sources are straining too much in an increasingly challenging business environment. Most of the information from traditional media sources is not verified and this contributes to the underserving of the audience. The traditional media sources are no longer authorization because their sources are not fact-checked. With their credulity at stake, they cannot influence change.

The media know that people have no meaningful ways to ensure accountability and consequences whenever the media disappoint. Most media house publishes rushed content with the misinformation regardless of the availability of facts (Golub, 2010). For example, Lewandowsky, et al (2012) posits that an irresponsible tweet or update by the media can have far-reaching consequences if wrongly interpreted. Wrong information can destroy lives and shatter a sense of safety in the crudity. If wrongly interpreted, a tweet or status update can have societal consequences including xenophobia, sexism, or racism. The fact is that in a journalist ignore the basic journalistic standards and ethics are potentially fatal.

While the media is not easy to hold accountable as an individual, people working together can hold the media accountable if the audience complains through letters, phones call, emails, and other forms of communication. With social media, communicative action is possible because the audience can easily mobilize their potential for rationality achieved with the ordinary language and its goal for a rationally motivated agreement (Kahan, 2017). The society is gullible to the level to which they are educated. If the society were educated on the evil of the media, they would be careful to accept the news as the gospel truth and start fact checking all contents. Most of the posts in the social media are done from the angle of meeting the needs of specific groups. Most media sources are more focused on pleasing their targeted audience. As such, the media present the content in a way that pleases their clientele and sponsors instead of being the stewards of the truth. The media houses should publicly take responsibility for the mistakes, or omission of their workers. They should publicly acknowledge the loss or damages cause day their employee's reports.

Rebuttal: Social media is making and effort, so should users.

The social media should be held accountable for the fake news and misinformation. However, the audiences should know to be educated on how best to identify and discern the fake news from the true news. Without effective fact-checking skills, it would be difficult for the various media houses to respond to all the false alarm. Knowing how to identify fake news can help reduce the number of false alarms that can cause fatigue (Waldrop, 2017). Additionally, social working sites such as Facebook have developed algorithms for fact checking which can be used by social media users whenever they doubt the authenticity of any news posted online. The machine learning software is increasingly improving its fact-checking ability. Even though the software is developed to fact check, the software may miss some of the fake news. That is why it should not be the only deciding factor. While social media is held accountable for deliberately bending news to cause disruption, the users should also be competent in checking and reporting fake news.

Conclusion

The field of journalisms has been adulterated with fake news. The fake news is biased, as such, the prevalence of the biased news has demonstrated that the fake news is both abundant and has the potential to significantly undermine democratic outcomes. With digital technology, becoming more advanced and acceptable, digital false information will continue to affect the flow of information flows in society and undermining the way, social policy issues are managed. However, fake news do not come from without, they originate from social media users w motived to misinform against the ethical values. For fake news to be successful, the must be tools that can be used to manipulate and spread the message across available social media network. There are also services that allow the distribution of such fake news. There is also the motive for spreading the fake news. These three must be identified and examined in details, which might be labor intensive and time consuming. All social media users, through their effort can help sanitize the social media news. The proliferation of false information had affected the credibility of journalism as the main conduit of information for both general news and pressing issues that society is facing.