Misinformation and its impact on how public percepts it has become a major issue, and this has become the key focus for social media platforms to focus on. These platforms are seen as the main culprit for spreading fake news that leads to confusion among the users.
But at this moment we don’t know the full impact of this. This is impossible to say how much impact these platforms have on the opinion of people, like in the case of the US presidential election, in particular, it became unsure how they are going to vote.
These days it feels like we have been dividing between choosing political and ideological lines compared to earlier times. And the gap between these two keeps on increasing as people keep using these social media. This particularly is the case for news on these platforms. But there must be a connection between these two, isn’t it?
A new study from Pew Research explains:
“The current analysis, based on a survey of 12,043 U.S. adults, finds that […] both Democrats and Republicans (including independents who lean toward either party) – in an unusual display of bipartisan convergence – register far more distrust than trust of social media sites as sources for political and election news. And the most distrusted are three giants of the social media landscape – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.“
With the help of above chart you can figure out that though a lot more people read news from these social media platforms as compared to reading the print newspaper, they still don’t trust the information that’s being provided there.
In another study conducted by Pew in 2018, 68% of Americans get some sort of news from social media, which accounts for 43% getting such from Facebook.
So despite most of the people visit Facebook to get some news every day, it still counts among the most distrusted news sources available at the moment.
