“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
-- Hannah Arendt
Over last decades. the popularity of social media as a news source has increased tremendously. I observed firsthand how people around me, belonging to different generations, consume the news mostly from Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter or YouTube. It has become as common for the older generation to say that the information they present as fact came ""from Facebook"", as it is for the younger generation to send you a link to a video from YouTube or a thread from X as the news source. With the rise of social media, the popularity of the traditional media sources (the newspapers, the major TV networks, NPR, etc) has declined.
I would like to discuss the ramifications of the changing nature of the news sources to the health of democracy. I will talk about pros and cons of these two sources of news. I will talk about the problems with the social media platforms as a news source: algorithms designed to maximize engagement, which promote lies and outrage; the business model based on collecting information for maximizing profits from targeted advertising; creation of echo chambers; lack of fact checking; fake news etc. I will touch upon the advantages of the traditional news sources (editorial control, fact checking) and their drawbacks (frequent biases leading to one-sided news coverage).
My objective is to come up with the set of heuristics leading to a healthier news diet, which could lead to a less polarized society and, consequently, to healthier democracy.