TikTok, TikTok... is time running out for informed societies as social media platforms shun hard news?
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Loading... - Banyu Saputra
- 03 Oct 2022
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For the past decade, Ms Diana Lou has been relying on Facebook for her daily dose of news.
But since the end of last year, the 58-year-old part-time early childhood educator has increasingly found herself having to go directly to the home page of the media outlets that she follows in order to stay abreast of what is happening around the world, instead of simply scrolling through her news feed.
This is because her feed has become increasingly populated by advertisements.
“The (Facebook) news feed is sickening. Now there are more and more advertisements. So I make it such that I purposefully go into the page that I’ve followed to (to read the news),” said Ms Lou.
Another user, 32-year-old Joanne Loh, has also noticed the change in her Facebook feed.
While the civil servant said that Facebook continues to be her main source of news, she is nevertheless “mildly frustrated” that the news content that appears on her feed is no longer in chronological order.
“It means that sometimes I’m reading news that’s three days old, and I’m thinking ‘oh, I missed this’,” said Ms Loh, adding that she has observed this occurring more frequently in the last two years or so.
Their experiences reflect the evolving changes that the social media giant has been making to its algorithm, which determines what — and in which order — users see their posts.
Since Mr Mark Zuckerberg and his then dormitory roommates created Facebook in 2004 as a way to connect students at Harvard University, it has greatly disrupted the way news is disseminated and consumed on the world wide web.
A report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2016 — more than a decade after Facebook was created — found that more than half of Internet users turned to social media news each week, with Facebook being the top social media news source among those surveyed.
However, over the years, Facebook has tweaked its algorithm from one which prioritises content — including news — based on chronology to one which pushes more targeted ads to users on their feeds, or posts with higher engagement.
Other social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, have similarly made changes to how their algorithms work, consequently shaping what and how newsrooms produce their news. Read More…
