Social Media: Trust Is in the Eyes of the Reader

On social media, so many things whiz across your computer screen or tablet screen or smartphone screen every day. Pretty much every time, you’ve got to question what you’re reading. Why? Because you can’t assume it’s correct just because it pops up on Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media network you’re monitoring. You’ve got to consider the source of the information when figuring out whether it’s real, phony or somewhere in between.

Today, an interesting story surfaced on my Facebook news feed: A CNBC panelist had inadvertently outed Apple CEO Tim Cook as a gay man. While it’s widely speculated that Cook is gay, he never has confirmed or denied it. The story came from Mediate.com, a website that covers the media industry.

How did I know this story was true? For one, I trust Mediate as a credible, reliable source of news and other information. For another, I did a Google search and found many other stories reporting the same news. Why did I do a Google search? Because even reliable media outlets get things wrong. I figure that when many media outlets are reporting the same information, it’s true on its face, although some of the finer details may be wrong.

More and more, we are depending on social media networks as significant sources of information. According to the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, half of Facebook and Twitter users get news from those sites, as do 62 percent of Reddit users.

Furthermore, many people say they trust that information. For instance, in a survey released in 2013 by George Washington University and research company ORI, nearly two-thirds of the people questioned said information about political candidates and issues on social media was the same as or better than that from traditional media.

Certainly, social media can be a reliable source for credible information. But just as easily, it can be an unreliable source of downright questionable information. Case in point: In early June this year, “rest in peace” messages were making the social media rounds concerning the death of former “Golden Girls” star Rue McClanahan. In reality, McClanahan died four years ago, in June 2010. How did this happen? A tweet observing the fourth anniversary of McClanahan’s death got twisted into tweet after tweet reporting that she had just died, according to the Washington Post.

The lesson here is this: Reader beware. Readers should not only know where information on social media is originating from, but also should verify the veracity of that information. In the social media era, we all must become fact-checkers.