Relying on Facebook for news?

By: 
Ethan Brogan

Social media has become an outlet to let friends and relatives know what is going on in your life. You got a new puppy, you went to your favorite restaurant for dinner, you birthed a new child etc.

But a study done by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation shows that 44 percent of adults in the U.S. get their new from Facebook. The social media behemoth started 13 years ago and has just recently reached 2 billion daily users. But perhaps getting your news information from a site that fills your news feed with like-minded people isn’t the best idea.

Lets say for instance you either follow CNN or FOX on Facebook. You follow the one that coincides with your partisanship. Now, if you looked at your feed on June 8, you would have saw one of two articles.

CNN: James Comey hoped leak would lead to special counsel on Russia.

FOX: Comey statement clears Trump of collusion, obstruction claims.

Both news outlets, one liberal and one conservative, see this trial differently and cater to their audience accordingly. Liberals wanted to see the special counsel on President Trump, and conservatives wanted to see his suspected collusion with Russia washed away. So they wrote the stories and chose the snippets to show what their audience would better respond to.

I am not saying both of these news outlets are wrong. But perhaps reading both stories can give you a better idea about what the middle ground is. If you go to your internet search engine and type in “James Comey testimony”, the results are varied from multiple news sources with different angles. But if we just go to Facebook and scroll down your news feed, you only get half the story.

Social media is a great way to connect with those close to your in your life, but what ever you do don’t block half the argument because it doesn’t cater how you would like the news to be.

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