Frontier Scholarship Application

Teenagers often turn to social media as a primary news source. What are the pros and cons of relying on social media for accuracy? How does that reliance impact your research and learning methods?

This generation of teenagers usually turns to social media as a primary news source, as it is a quick convenient way to gather information. In the age of technology and social media, teenagers want to get information as fast as they can. The fact that they have social media like Twitter and Facebook at their fingertips (on their smart phones) makes these sources the quickest way to gather information. Having social media as a source of news allows teenagers to get the information they want to know in a short and condensed version without reading the entire news article. However, they don’t take into consideration the quality or accuracy of the news. The short snip-its and headlines can sometimes be misleading and biased, but teenagers are taking the information at face value and not really considering other accounts of the information. 

Relying on information that has the potential to be incorrect due to biased journalism has the ability to impact our research and learning methods. Taking news spread through social media at its face value can impact how we believe the event took place. If we don’t research the topic through other news sources, we can develop biased or incorrect beliefs about what actually happened. This is similar to research projects done in the classroom; if we stop at the first source that we come too, we are going to see the topic in only one way, but if we do some research and see other sides to the story, we can develop our own ideas and see the event in a whole new light. 

I personally choose not to use social media as my source of news. However, I do use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to hear about an event or topic, but I then do more research on the topic by finding and reading the actual news article to get all of the information. For example, when the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting occurred, I was in class and I was notified via Twitter, but then turned to ABC News to read the entire article. In this case, Twitter was helpful in spreading news in the sense that I could read someone's tweet of 140 characters and get an idea of what happened, but then I was able to use that information to research the topic deeper to get more information. When I do this, I feel that I become more educated on the topic because I have a better understanding on the entire story. I encourage others to expand their knowledge by taking the opportunity to dive deeper and actually understand the news rather than just accepting what they read on social media.

Ashley Shell 
Boise State University 
ashleyshell@u.boisestate.edu