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  • The social media news cycle is driven by influencers and alternative media, rather than traditional news outlets. This makes it harder for users to verify facts, while also diminishing their faith in mainstream journalism. It also, as highlighted by the report, decreases their trust in political institutions: 21% of the young people surveyed expressed scepticism toward the EU, and 15% admitted they skipped the 2024 EU vote due to a lack of information.

    I think here cause and effect are not as simple as presented in the article. "Traditional news outlets" are often deliberately filtering and ignoring certain topics, peddling institutional disinformation and representing the interests of their billionaire owners and increasingly consolidating into the control of less and larger companies. These aren't new issues. There is an extensive analysis for the US from Herman and Chomsky, called Manufacturing Consent - The political economy of the mass media. The book is from 1988 yet its analysis still holds true today. Chapters like "worthy and unworthy victims" that were analyzed in the context of Vietnam and US backed Terrorists in Central America can be copied word by word onto todays conflicts, like Israel/Palestine.

    On top of these systemic issues with "traditional" media there came a significant decline in quality with more clickbait, just pure copies of reuters/AP/DPA and fabricated outrage based on social media posts, since news moved online more and more.

    Finally the quality of "traditional" media is often bad. If you read a bad article in your physical newspaper, you might recognize it in topics you are familiar with. Now you see a link and people comment how this or that aspect is bad/false and provide further reading.

    Meanwhile there is some "alternative" media that provide extensive references, show things that are deliberately omitted by "traditional" media like videos of police violence, videos of people being abused, bombed, murdered by allied countries or "our own" soldiers, corruption in institutions...

    These are all reasons, why people turn away from "traditional" media. Yes Social media and the algorithms have significant problems with disinformation. However they also exposed, how bad "traditional" media is and how it often is equally riddled with disinformation and propaganda.

    • My first though in reading the title was "well when your alternatives are shit like fox or CNN, you might as well just get it from social media."

      There's about the same amount of integrity from it, and it's way easier to think "man, this one guy I'm watching might not know what he's talking about" than it is to think "this whole team of people are wrong" but then you have to take into account the parasocial relationship many viewers have with their content providers. It's easier to trust "Paul" because he's wearing the same clothes I am, speaking to me the way I talk, giving me things I like to hear.

      Content creators (I stubbornly refuse to call them 'influencers') will push brands and sponsors all day every day, but news outlets will fabricate your entire reality at the behest of whatever rich fuck is in charge. News outlets happily run state propaganda, knowing they are lies.

      Conclusion: all media sucks. Sensory deprivation chambers are the future of mankind if we are to survive. And I'm only partially joking, I think.

  • Leaving this in foreign hands is a clear mistake. Federated networks, with cores in different countries, could be an acceptable solution, but anything else cannot be accepted.

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