With more than 1.9 billion logged-in users visiting YouTube each month, and 2.32 billion monthly active users on Facebook, there’s room for a million agendas and a veritable smorgasbord of information that’s either worthy of our trust or utter nonsense.
YouTube, it’s been found, is “the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat”.
Meanwhile, “companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law,” the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (who might have had their collective back put up because Mark Zuckerberg refused to give evidence to parliament) said in their final report on Disinformation and ‘fake news’.
“TV,” reported Ofcom, “is still the first port of call for news but people go to social media first for an alternative viewpoint on the news, despite users being less likely to see views they disagree with on social media.”
In 2017, Facebook and Google – owner of YouTube – generated more than a hundred billion dollars, about half of all the money spent on online advertising worldwide.
That’s a lot of power.
There isn’t time to explore every link on abyznewslinks.com every day but maybe we should be encouraging kids to:
- Pay attention to the language used in the news they consume
- Compare stories that matter across at least two news outlets
- Be wary of anonymous sources
- Think critically
Thanks to my mate Andy who told me about the recent 5 Live Breakfast phone-in on fake news which inspired this post.
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