Why We Need Social Media Bias

The new social media has not made for a more enlightened, connected and democratic society. Instead, it has used mechanisms to instill fear and mass hysteria to those following them and will continue to negatively influence and mislead people in the future.

The traditional media that baby boomers have used is the newspaper. A newspaper passes through many editors and every person is assigned a single section, so you know your section well. Information is passed through journalists to writers before finally heading to the final editor and being sent out to the masses. Newspaper outlets understood that due to limited alternative media, they had an incredible responsibility to the public to present facts based journalism so the citizens would be informed. Television news became the easiest way for people to know what’s going on in the city. The biggest difference here is that newspaper were a printed material and the nightly news was broadcasted through television, so the nightly news was more up to date than a newspaper. Television news came with emotion, and an additional inherent bias compared to …show more content…
When Twitter was created, it was used to connect people; now you can tweet at your favorite band or a political figure in your own city and get a real time response! But you also aren’t censored in any way. I could tweet out complete lies and if someone found them convincing enough, they could retweet them to their own followers and again, it would have a snowball effect.

The biggest differences between traditional media and new media, is that new media can be created by anyone. Traditional media needed to be thoroughly checked, and issued apologies for misinformation. There is none of that in new media, no one is held accountable for their words or actions. Nothing is sourced in new media, it’s all unknown, and so people believe it based on the fact that it’s even on a social media