Jieun Shin
Assistant Professor, UF’s College of Journalism and Communications
A journalist’s pivot to academia and the study of social media
Jieun Shin is an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. Her research focuses on how social media algorithms spread misinformation and disinformation, as well as their lingering effects on society.
Before Shin became a professor in 2018, she worked as a journalist for South Korea’s oldest newspaper, the Chosun Daily. She said she made the career change into academia when she noticed how social media increased the amount of unverified rumors that journalists interacted with.
Shin then began researching the social impact of algorithms, noting that people change their behavior and decision-making based on what they see on social media. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, and Mass Communication & Society.
By Robert Davis
While sensational news isn’t necessarily a new problem, the way it is packaged and sold to news consumers is.
The recommendation algorithms that social media companies use incentivize media outlets to produce sensational content to attract eyeballs. In turn, journalists will try to make serious topics land a little softer, or make it sexy for their readers so they will engage with the content online.
I conducted a study in early 2022 where I asked a group of journalists and a group of regular internet users to read a series of news articles and rate their journalistic value in terms of truthfulness, the accuracy of the reporting, and whether or not the information is useful. Then, I compared their responses to how the same articles performed on Facebook in terms of likes, shares, and engagement. What I found is that the less useful news — the trivial headlines about cats and dogs or Nicki Minaj— always outperformed the more useful news about government corruption and things like that.
This is a problem because of the trust that people tend to put into social media websites. One reason people trust Twitter and Facebook is because these social media platforms can spread information much cheaper than in pricey, legacy media outlets like the Washington Post or the New York Times.
But there’s also no gatekeeping on social media, and so there tends to be a wide availability of misinformation and disinformation on those platforms. People don’t really trust information anymore because of it, and in turn they don’t trust each other. That really drags everybody down together.
The Demise of Journalists as Gatekeepers
The way individual news stories perform is very important, and the impact of stories is measured by the number of eyeballs it attracts. That’s largely because these metrics are important to advertisers. That creates a circular problem where the quality of news articles is judged by the engagement it receives on social media, whereas the algorithms that social media platforms use incentivize sensational information.
This is problematic given the space social media platforms occupy as public spaces for debate. Their algorithms are designed to maximize the reach of their content, but the algorithms are also blind to the content filtering that social media companies have been getting better at over the last 10 years.
There’s also no gatekeeping on social media, and so there tends to be a wide availability of misinformation and disinformation on those platforms. People don’t really trust information anymore because of it, and in turn they don’t trust each other.
For example, social media companies worked to limit misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic because misinformation about the virus was endangering public health. But social media platforms can’t really avoid hosting sensational takes on COVID-19 because they know you’ll click on them.
Before social media, journalists were the information gatekeepers of society. They verified the facts and selected the news, and information was generally easy to trust because that was the consensus.
When I worked at the Chosun Daily, reputation was very important because your reputation as a journalist could lead to receiving a few good tips from your sources. Everybody worked on rumors within their networks, whether it was a press release or a human source, and tried to verify the truth of that information in the interest of the public.
However, there’s also no consensus on what social media’s responsibility is as far as providing access or spreading trustworthy information for the public. For instance, Facebook has flip-flopped about whether it will run political advertisements because they don’t want to be seen as promoting content that favors either Democrats or Republicans. But every time they show you a funny cat video, it takes away from your energy to dig for information that matters to your community or that could help you vote. That becomes a discrepancy between those who actually receive news, and it’s overwhelmingly the wealthier people and the well-educated.
Keeping the Public Good in Mind
Where can ordinary people get quality information now? We’ve tried citizen journalism, but quickly found that it was unsustainable. There simply aren’t enough people who are going to go to the town hall every day when there’s an important announcement. The news provided by citizen journalists tends to be commentary — it’s not actual reporting. They just recycle someone else’s reporting for their specific audience. It’s a little worrisome.
Part of the solution could be to use public money to support journalism. Look at European countries like Germany, Norway, and Finland that spend a lot of money to support journalism. They take it as a public-health issue, and their media environments are a lot healthier because of it. We could use that money to create a department or some agency with the technical expertise to explain what social media companies are doing to the public. That could mean making their code more transparent and giving some clarity about what they promote and why.
Social media companies also need to continue working on the technology they’re using to weed out the misinformation that exists on their platforms today because the sheer volume of it makes it very difficult to spot.
At the same time, social media companies should consider the public good when they publish content. They don’t care about traditional journalistic values such as accuracy or fairness. Instead, they just publish everything they can and let their users decide what information is valuable.
Solving the issues created by these algorithms is going to take a collective effort. It’s not just on the journalists, because the media industry overall is struggling. We can’t just ask media outlets to behave a certain way when the environment they live in incentivizes them to act the way they do today.