News media needs to fight misinformation and fake news in the 2020 US presidential election

The proliferation of social media platforms such

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as Twitter and Facebook means that people are more and more likely to encounter news for the first time when someone in their social circle posts about it. Often, these posts contain the poster's opinion of the news, meaning that whomever is seeing them is getting news and opinion at the same time. This sort of socially mediated information is what Wihbey calls "social fact."

"Information is increasingly filtered through social channels," Wihbey says. "It's different from the 20th century, when people got information directly from news sources such as TV broadcasts, or newspapers, or magazines."

Journalists and news organizations have to acknowledge that people are increasingly presented with social facts (as opposed to empirical facts) and begin to produce news that addresses this shift, Wihbey says.

Social circles have existed since the dawn of humanity, and the mass media as we understand it has existed for hundreds of years. So, while social facts are not necessarily new problems, the internet has made them far more pervasive than ever before, Wihbey says. Anyone can hop online and consume information from anyone, anywhere, all the time.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-news-media-misinformation-fake-presidential.html