Any number of contemporary critics of mass media and technology have come to the conclusion that no single topic of late has attracted more attention than the rise of social media in its many different forms especially the potential impact of social media on the news. Mitchell, Rosenstiel, and Christian (2012, p. 1) pointed out that “if searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be the most important of the next.”
Social media consists of a variety of discrete yet occasionally overlapping media vehicles including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Other social media with specific purposes include dating sites, sales platforms, blogs, YouTube, and so on. These media vehicles
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Researchers note that both Facebook and Twitter dominate the intersection of social media and news with over one billion people using Facebook across the globe and more
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than 250 million active Twitter users known as Tweeps who post millions of Tweets each and every day. Barry Ritholtz (2012, p. 2) said that “Twitter has become the new newswires. It has supplanted AP, Dow Jones, and Bloomberg for breaking news.”
The world found out about a number of critical events through Twitter before television broadcast and cable news interrupted programming to showcase a major global event.
Seal Team 6, responsible for killing Osama bin Laden was introduced to the world on
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There are many advantages of social media including its immediacy, its capacity for fostering interaction between providers and readers, its flexibility, its capacity to combine video and graphics and text in some platforms, and its low cost (Sounman, 2012).
At the same time, Twitter has the capacity for allowing anyone to say just about anything without any meaningful censorship, fact checking, or oversight. Critics of new media as a news purveyor are quick to point out that none of the conventions, standards, or ethical codes that are adhered to with varying degrees of responsibility by traditional journalists have no impact in cyberspace (Shekhtman, 2016). This creates a situation in which Twitter subscribers are exposed to what is increasingly referred to as “fake news,” stories or comments that may have little or no relationship to