Social Media Could Still Fix the News

My problem isn’t with the news. My assumption is, since the beginning, the news has always been littered with propaganda, disinformation, and other useless trash, just as much as solid, fact-based reporting. Money and power are involved and there’s never going to be a perfect system that allows people to receive the “best” or “most important” information from “trusted” sources, always. Like most things in life, there’s good and bad information and people should trust their gut when determining what that means to them and go from there. My problem is with how the news is delivered.

I rarely click on articles that appear in my Google feed. Even if there’s an article from BuzzFeed or the Boston Globe that I kinda want to click on, I do my best not to so Google doesn’t convince itself to shove it in my face. Same goes for other major publications. When I’m on social media, I almost never click on an article shared by someone else from a mainstream publication. That’s not because “FAKE NEWS” or anything like that. The thing I distrust the most is myself and my ability to consistently cut through all the layers that put this content in front of me.

Who’s sharing this article and why? Even if I try not to let it, that information is going to play a role in how I consume a news item. What I want more than anything for the news, in general, is a place to go and read it, unfiltered, good or bad, without feeling like an algorithm has decided what’s good for me. My suggestion: social media platforms, with their immense capital, should either build their own editorial operations or buy news outlets.

When I say, build their own editorial operations, I don’t mean I bullshit task forces or corporate think tanks that comb over how platforms are used and try to curate an “authentic,” “trustworthy” environment. I mean invest in skilled reporters to publish the news for, hypothetically, the Facebook Times. Instead of building a separate website, tailor the platform so that reporters can write their items directly on the page, like ordinary comments.

Why should social media platforms buy news outlets? To avoid the redundancies that make the internet a dumpster fire. I try my best not to like social media or allow search engines to filter my thoughts, but even still, 80 percent of the time those are the only URLs I’ll bother typing in the search bar, out of habit and efficiency. But like I said, I rarely click. I read enough headlines and hear enough chatter to get a general sense of things, then move on.

I want to care enough to read the news again. I believe having centralized hubs built within platforms that billions already use anyway could, in the long run, help untangle the information knots created by link sharing and rapid redirection to external sites with competing agendas and motives. I want to pay attention to the news but I can’t keep track of where it’s all coming from and why.