US adults who mostly rely on social media for news are less informed | Hacker News Reader

US adults who mostly rely on social media for news are less informed

techcrunch.com

53 pointslxm25 comments

Hopefully nobody is surprised by this.

Not simply because of the cesspool that most social media has become. But because of the centuries-old saying, "You get what you pay for."

Don't want to pay for professional journalists to do real reporting? Then you don't get to find out what's going on. It's common sense.

It seems you might be the person who prefers to get news from headlines, which is perfectly fine, but the article says that it's likely that they're less informed not because of anything to do with social media or the type of journalism they're exposed to, but because they have less interest in political news.

and, the news people get on social media is a direct result of who they follow, their friends. I am guessing most people arent following a ton of news organizations on Facebook, so what they are exposed to are the most viral headlines that spread by shares.

Facebook, is a tool, and your experience is what you make of it. Follow good sources, get good results. Follow highly tribalistic and fringe people, get edge results.

But back to your original point, unless the majority people are using Facebook to seek out news, their passive consumption is going to be them liking entertainment and not wanting it displaced by serious things.

It can definitely have a perverse effect on perception, but I think it can also build skepticism over time. Being exposed to a lot of misinformation and conspiracy theories can be healthy if the reader is expecting to find it and learning what kinds of stories compel people to respond by emotion instead of reason. People in former communist countries learned this.

> People in former communist countries learned this.

One would hope that people could learn from that history, rather than elect politicians who have bought into the QAnon crap...

> It seems you might be the person who prefers to get news from headlines

How in the world did you conclude that from GP's comment?

It's not a conclusion, it's an ad hominem attack.

Sorry to make it seem like it, but I thought it was a perfect example of the trend being examined in the story. There are more important things in life than reading every statistical analysis of social media trends, and some people find things more meaningful than looking deeply into political news.

Active involvement is more important than reading a lot of punditry. It’s healthy that not everyone is interested in reading everything they come across. Sometimes, this can lead to wrong conclusions or being uninformed on trivia, but nobody has time for perfect knowledge.

>it's likely that they're less informed not because of anything to do with social media or the type of journalism they're exposed to, but because they have less interest in political news.

that's dangerously close to trying to control the thing you want to measure. It seems plausible if not likely that social media use is what's driving declining interest in political news because the engagement driven nature of social media is increasingly crowding out say, long form print media.

It’s not a certain conclusion, but there is always a part of the population that will be disinterested in politics. From what I’ve seen, interest hit a low point in the 1990s before the Internet caught on. That politically disinterested people would primarily get political news by accident while scrolling for memes seems pretty likely, but I’m sure experience and interest have effects in both directions.

Common sense isn't common or sense. Getting what you pay for as a guarantee is a downright lie from marketers. While you can't get more than what you pay for sustainably (undervalued supply would dry up and be arbitraged to truer value) there is nothing stopping you from paying $200 for a 20 cent product identical except for the bullshit wrapped around it.

I can't find the details in the study as to what counts as "social media". If I read a New York times article linked from reddit, did I use social media to get my news? What if I only read links to things from reddit? Are they basically saying that if social media is your only curation, then you'll be less informed?

That I can totally get behind. Having worked in and used social media for more than 15 years, I can definitely say that a lack of curation from trained journalists is a big problem these days.

Journalists and editors serve a useful purpose. I still listen to terrestrial radio because of the curation. It's better than Spotify.

I like read the New York times daily newsletter and the APs daily brief because the curate important stories, some of which I don't see on social media.

It's all about curation.

This is a good example of why studies need to be well designed in order to avoid being useless.

The headline suggests that this will tell us something about social media, but I really think it just tells us that people who spend time and energy on being informed are more informed.

People who get their news primarily from social media are, by definition, people who don't seek out news in other venues. The study does not seek to ascertain if they are seeking out news on social media (i.e. they think social media is sufficient) or if they simply encounter it on accident in their non-news-related use. It seems like, if the goal is to understand how social media impacts understanding of the news, this study asked very bad questions.

In fact, if you remove nearly everything about social media, I think this piece gets clearer and the study stronger. People who don't seek out news coverage and encounter news on accident are less informed and somewhat more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

It's interesting that techcrunch talks about demographic weaknesses (which are also good to note) but doesn't really dive into what feels like a more basic problem.

No that prevents counting what people who are in the primarily-social-media group would do if social media didn't make them feel as informed as they are.

It also doesn't consider the type of news writing people get from each source. Some sources, like long form news articles, can cultivate interest. Others, like news clickbait, have no motivation or room on the page to cultivate. Clickbait often focuses on shallow answers that don't disclose the depth of the topic.

>U.S. adults who get their news largely from social media platforms, and compare their understanding of current events and political knowledge to those who use other sources, like TV, radio and news publications.

Well, I'd bet most of the news they get surely come from media outlets--like techcrunch--that post on social media. Perhaps a better distinction would be between not reading past headlines on social media and actually reading--or even skimming through--articles published in any given website. Even then, the vast majority of "news publications" are guilty of clickbait, and that's not something techcrunch is innocent of.

I've also seen scummy tactics like changing the headline to be less "clickbaity" some timeframe after the article is released.

Then there's also the disgusting tactic from news companies on social media like Twitter where they post the same article multiple times to spam it across people's feeds throughout the day.

I think wide adoption of social media is the cancer that destroyed great journalism the world over.

>I've also seen scummy tactics like changing the headline to be less "clickbaity" some timeframe after the article is released.

Now that you mention it, just recently I began noticing how some news publications in my country do this, especially on interviews or opinion pieces. They'll put a seemingly outrageous, absolutely out of context quote by the interviewee or the author on the headline, only to modify it a couple of hours later.

>I think wide adoption of social media is the cancer that destroyed great journalism the world over.

I agree. I'd even go on to say that social media--with the necessary aid of smartphones--has amplified all the negative aspects of capitalism and globalisation, in general.

> The firm’s research also found that social media news consumers skewed young — 48% of those who mostly used social media for news were between 18 and 29, for example. They also tended to have lower levels of formal education, as only 26% had a college degree, versus 47% of those who read news websites or the 49% who turn to print.

So the only actual insight here is that younger people are less informed on average (big surprise).

I take these results with a grain of salt, since the quality of news on social media varies widely from timeline to timeline. If all you follow on your social media platform of choice is recognized, credible news outlets then you'd consume the same information as radio or TV, but probably closer to real-time. This study doesn't control for this variable so it doesn't tell us much.

I was not expecting an article based on a statistical study, with this title, be this well-crafted. Caveats about self-reporting data, highlights on confounding factors in the conclusion, it is really good work.

You can't take anything really interesting from this study, but at least i found a writer i believe i can trust when talking about point i'm less competent in.

The study smacks of elitism, gotcha questions and tailored outcomes. You are comparing regular NY Times, NPR, Boston Globe readers, which is an extremely biased sample - above average education, affluent and engaged to people who read news on SM casually.

Look at two of the questions from the "facts" based survey:

https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/election-news-pathways...

(1) - Whether the unemployment rate in the U.S. has gone up, down or stayed the same since Donald Trump took office (gone down)

(2) - What determines the number of votes a state has in the Electoral College (the number of seats the state has in the U.S. House and Senate)

These are extremely technical questions. In (1) are they talking about the unemployment rate till any point on time, which is a random variable or the average? A gotcha questions

In (2), I do read an hour of two of news everyday (I know, it is a problem) and did really well on American History, but that question would still take me a few moments to ponder.

The causality is backwards - people who read SM to get news are less engaged and the people who read the establishment media are more engaged. Like the cigarette industry publishing an ad on the efficacy of cigarettes as an health aid.

Newspapers say anyone who gets the news from their competition is stupider. Film at 11.

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." -- Thomas Jefferson

I only rely on HN for news :-) Seriously.

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read it, you're misinformed."

- Denzel Washington

This is bullshit. Social media is perfectly fine at informing people.

It's almost as much bullshit as Apple ripping off developers by screwing them out of money when a customer requests a refund, am I right people?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com