The writer of this article was part of a summer honors experience: Voices From Our Backyard: Local News Narratives during which students created and wrote stories to be published in community news outlets.
By Giang Ho
The first thing William (last name withheld) does after he wakes up in the morning is reach for his phone. He opens Instagram and scrolls through the app for at least an hour every day.
“My screentime is four hours for social media today. It could even go up as much as to 9 hours,” William said.
However, as a college student in the middle of Ohio, he says he needs social media.
“Ninety percent of what is happening around the world is learned from social media for me. Only the other 10 percent I get from around my campus,” he said.
William is just one of many college students who choose to use social media as a source of news to raise their social awareness instead of reading newspapers.
“My best example of what I have learned from social media is the knowledge of what is happening in Gaza right now. Seeing real footage of people suffering helped me understand and sympathize with their situation a lot better. These aren’t the types of information I can get from mainstream media,” William said.
Eighty nine percent of college students get their news from social media at least weekly according to “How students engage with news” by Project Information Literacy. The most common platforms are Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram. The number of students who have defined news as necessary in a democracy is eighty-two percent of college students.
However, the same study also showed that 68 percent of students said the sheer amount of news available to them was overwhelming.
“I try to stay away from news on social media for my own sanity. I only want to watch and send funny videos to my friends,” Baltimore County student Hudson Salazar said.
Apart from feeling intimidated by the number of news items they have come across, students also try to stay away from news when they are uncertain about the legitimacy of the sources for their information.
Rosina Kirk, a CCBC student expressed her skepticism about news on social media. “People spread misinformation on social media all the time, for fame or for money,” she said.
When asked if she had ever fallen for online misinformation, Rosina admits that she did. She used the example of a trend in which staying healthy meant trying to have an invisible waist and looking like a supermodel.
“Instead of focusing on making my waist tiny like those influencers said, I have been learning to focus on eating healthy and working out, which actually helps me stay healthier,” she said.
The article, “The Danger of 'Fake News': How Using Social Media for Information Dissemination Can Inhibit the Ethical Decision Making Process” by Rahul S. and associate, 2022 shows us that when presented with the same information, social media as the context results in lower problem recognition and sense making strategies, compared to news articles alone or a combination of both articles and social media.
My Tran, a Minerva University student shares her own perspective saying, “While scrolling [on social media], my brain is not set to be thinking critically.”
Therefore, Tran has a preference over which type of news topic she gets from social media versus traditional news articles. She decided social media is useful for getting to know people’s personal stories because she gets to see real people with their documented story.
“An example for this is when someone shared their experience with racism in China... for me it was a more credible source than news,” she explained.
“But [to learn about] politics and economic information, I really felt like (a) newspaper is better,” she said. “The news will help me reach different sources of information and give me time to verify the credibility of information.”
As a regular consumer of social media content, William also feels the need to use other sources in addition to what he learned through social media.
“News articles are credible sources that I have used a few times for school before. I’m developing the habit of reading more online newspapers,” he said. “I haven’t, but I’m trying.”
William is not the only one who wanted to get some of his news from online newspapers instead of fully from social media. Reaching a younger demographic of news readers with social media is also what many news sources are trying to do.
“Individual journalists and news organizations as a whole create accounts on social media platforms to distribute stories,” John Kirch, Associate Professor of Journalism at Towson University and the creator of The Baltimore Watchdog said.
“They hope that the stories they post on social media will engage audiences and eventually encourage people to go to the news organization's website for more information. The trouble is that while most young people will turn to social media to get the news created by traditional media outlets like newspapers, magazines, TV/cable networks, and radio stations, they rarely go to the websites of those news organizations for additional information,” he said.
Kirch also cautioned people against saying they get their news from social media sites because the news is not produced by social media companies themselves.
“The story was created by an individual journalist, news organization, or commentator who then used the social media platform to distribute the story to the audience. This is an important distinction to make in your mind,” he said.
