According to the latest research, social media is also suboptimal for political education
Those who get news via social media are more likely to believe misinformation regarding COVID-19. This is the result of a study led by McGill University . Social media users are therefore less likely to adhere to social distancing guidelines than people who rely more on traditional news media.
Pew Research Center shows something similar . Accordingly, Americans who get news primarily via social media are also less informed about political issues.
Nonsense on the social web
“Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are increasingly becoming the primary source of news and misinformation for Canadians and people around the world,”
says Aengus Bridgman, a political science doctoral candidate at McGill. To better understand the role of social media in spreading nonsense, he and his colleagues analyzed nearly 2.5 million tweets and 9,000 news articles covering COVID-19 in Canada.
The result: Social media users consider the virus to be less dangerous due to the fake news circulating there and therefore often don't care about social distancing - thus becoming a health risk.
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The analysis by the Pew Research Center paints a similar picture for the USA. In the country that loves conspiracy theories, a third of the population already believes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “certainly” or “probably” planned by powerful people. However, among those who see social media as their most important source of news, the proportion of conspiracy believers is as high as 44 percent.
On the other hand, only 23 percent of social media users even follow COVID-19 news closely; Among Americans who prefer national news networks or cable TV news, however, it is half.
Political ignorance
Even outside of COVID-19, the nearly fifth of Americans who rely primarily on social media for news are less informed, according to Pew Research. 57 percent of those surveyed for the analysis who believed they were informed about politics and the upcoming elections were able to answer a maximum of five out of nine questions about political knowledge correctly.
Only 17 percent got eight or nine correct numbers. Among Americans who prefer other news sources, there are generally far fewer politically uneducated people and far more highly educated people. Only local television, as the main source of information, performed worse than social media.
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Source: press text
Article image: Shutterstock / By StunningArt
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )