What is your opinion on this?
I remember reading the newspaper when I was younger, and had to turn to the page opposite to the editorials to read the opinion pieces. They had outstanding pieces with top thinkers in the field who expressed their opinion on some news topic or how they felt about the issue. The rest of the paper was this impersonal wall of text with facts and stories about recent and upcoming events. But this section had a personal connection to it. It is no coincidence that I remember more names of famous The Hindu opinion columnists than their other writers.
Ah, what a time to be alive when we can instantly connect with everyone and see what they have to say. We have near-instant access to all major events, be it political, scientific or celeb gossip. But this news doesn’t just arrive alone (Don’t tell me you are some kind of non-conformist who subscribes just to Reuters or any other wire agency). It arrives with people’s opinions on top of it. The article is reduced to just the headline and thumbnail with a block of text about how people feel about this news. It is a great way for engagement due to the personal nature of the commentary, the same reason why I enjoyed opinion columns. But there is a goldilocks zone between news and opinion. Now we are drowning in a sea of opinion with not enough news interspersed in between. It is similar to people forcing on us what to think about a particular issue. Individuals don’t get to develop their thoughts on any issue in a vacuum.
It is like getting a spoiler for a movie. You will mostly approach that piece with an implicit bias attached. Some people do benefit from this and present their arguments and counterarguments to change the narrative and offer more information or nuance. I am in no way arguing for people to not have an opinion or not express them as they wish.
The silent majority
There are two kinds of people online, content creators and content consumers. I am counting someone who posts even one post a week on social media as a content creator. Even then, most of us fall into the latter category. Though it might feel like everyone is posting about their weekend, the Pareto principle still applies. According to this Pew report1, just ten per cent of Twitter user create eighty per cent of the content. This is a rant from one of the consumers of the content. Just watching people’s opinions becomes a passive activity and over time we may lose our personal judgement and tend to take the opinions of the people we are following as facts.
It is important to always be able to distinguish between fact and opinion. The line between the two is often blurry but never absent. Good writers can present both in their content such that they are easily distinguishable. But what about bad ones, or let’s say incompetent ones and not ascribe malice to their intent? There is no straightforward answer for this. It is the reason social media influencers are a thing now and a weapons manufacturer with a good PR firm can have a better reputation online than some aid organisation.
The infinite loop
This lack of differentiation between fact and opinion is further exacerbated in academic journalism; where the original text is verbose or even inaccessible to the casual reader(Thanks Elsevier). He just has to rely on the news report and assume that the study or the authors are indeed reaching the same conclusion as has been reported. Which leads people to comment and opine on the study just based on the news article which is a dangerous game of Chinese whispers.
There can be no arbiter of truth when fact-checking websites can be partisan themselves. People will have to decide for themselves and based on the current online climate, they are not very good at it. Most of the ecosystem people follow is decided by the first few steps they take and the people they follow or the articles they like. After that, there is a positive reinforcement loop where you are shown more and more pieces that affirm with what’s in your feed and what you engage with2.
Who’s to blame?
I guess this is the folly of getting your news from the same place you go to post pictures of your dog or share a funny meme. It’s like people don’t go to Netflix to watch a couple of MOOCs, so why get your news on Facebook? Simplicity or the addictive nature of it may be one reason. Still, we blame smokers for making the choice to smoke; we don’t blame the cigarette for existing, in the same way, it is the people’s choice to decide where they may get their news. But it is getting more and more difficult to make the correct choice.
Finally, I like my news how I like my coffee… Black; pure, unadulterated, and direct from the source. Sure, I will enjoy the occasional cappuccino, but always come back to the original sooner rather than later.
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