Social media, from Twitter to Facebook to blogs, is playing an ever more prominent role in our understanding of world events. The public no longer has to rely on traditional news outlets for reportage and commentary. Instead, everyone and anyone can be a de facto journalist. Videos and images of incidents can be uploaded instantly; commentary on a protest can be tweeted as it happens; and anyone with a broadband connection can let millions of others know their particular take on an issue or event. But is this as progressive as it sounds? Is social media improving our understanding of major world events?

The democratisation of the media
There is certainly no doubting the impact of social-media technology, be it the advent of the smart phone or the emergence of social networks like Twitter. In the words of one academic, it has allowed ‘anyone to become a journalist at little cost… Nothing like this has ever been remotely possible before’. [Ref: American Journalism Review]. For many, this is a positive development. It means that we do not have to rely solely on big media companies to interpret the world for us; we can start to use other sources, other commentators, and even make the news ourselves. As a result, our understanding of world events potentially deepens. So, as one social media advocate explains, if particular media outlets aren’t considered trustworthy, people can now find what they want elsewhere: ‘What’s more, they could stop being passive recipients. They could dig deeply into topics, follow their interests, and share their knowledge and passions with others who care about similar things’ [Ref: Nieman Reports]. As one radical journalist puts it, social media ‘threatens the monopoly of the media elite’, ‘scutinising’ it and ‘challenging its assumptions’. She concludes: ‘we are forging a path through the miasma of technological change towards a more honest, democratic model of commentary’ [Ref: New Statesman]. Nowhere, perhaps, was the democratisation of the media more in evidence than in the Arab Spring. So-called old-media outlets were largely caught cold by the rapidly unfolding events in Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt. It wasn’t professional journalists spreading the news, it was ordinary citizens, armed with little more than access to a social network. Little wonder some christened the Egyptian uprising as the ‘Facebook revolution’ [Ref: TIME]. One citizen journalist, convinced of the capacity for social media to enlighten, argued that during the Arab Spring, social media became a place ‘to shape and discuss articles of the constitution, build mass awareness campaigns, and have entire Facebook-based news agencies with millions of worldwide subscribers’ [Ref: European]. Others were less convinced of social media’s political role, but did not doubt that events in Egypt showed ‘the ways in which social media and Twitter in particular are transforming both media coverage and human rights documentation. For now, that’s the real revolution’ [Ref: Huffington Post]. This democratisation of the media, argues Dan Gillmoor, allows us to get closer to the truth of what’s happening. Citing the use of grainy camera-phone footage in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, he points out that the overtaking of professional news and photo journalists by their ‘“amateur” fellow citizens’ means ‘we will have more genuine media than before, as in the authenticity of the London image, and that is a good thing for us all’ [Ref: Al Jazeera].

A medium for falsehood
Others are less convinced of the merits of citizen journalism. As the Economist notes, the rise of social media in the reporting of world events has both done away with editors, and highlighted precisely why they are necessary [Ref: Economist]. In the absence of editorial standards, social media allows half-truths, conspiracy theories and wild rumours to flourish. Hyunjin Seo, a Kansas University professor of journalism, even calls social media ‘an amplifier of misinformation’ [Ref: Topeka-Capital Journal]. This problem, evident in the Boston Bombings where Reddit users were scouring relevant photos looking to identify the bombers, resulted in several people being misidentified as the culprits [Ref: Wired]. Even US president Barack Obama felt it necessary to warn against ‘jumping to conclusions’ ‘in this age of instant reporting, tweets and blogs’ [Ref: Huffington Post]. As one commentator complained, ‘We have more information, but it’s a morass of truths, half-truths, and what we used to call libel. It’s fast, but it’s bad. And bad information is a cancer that just keeps growing.’ Even the social media coverage of the Arab Spring was criticised for exaggeration and inaccuracy. Marc Lynch, in particular, criticised the hype and mistruths peddled during the Egyptian uprising. ‘I still remember the first time I was driving around a perfectly calm, absolutely normal Cairo’, he writes, ‘while reading a Twitter feed describing apocalyptic clashes and mayhem’ [Ref: Foreign Policy]. Journalism professor Roy Greenslade, however, argues that we should not blame the social media for false reporting. It’s not about the tools, he says, ‘it’s all about the people, the human beings, who use, and misuse, those tools’ [Ref: Evening Standard].

A deeper understanding?
Some suggest that social media has the capacity to improve our understanding of world events by raising awareness of events and stories that other mainstream outlets have ignored. A well-known example of this was the Kony 2012 video, which attempted to focus public attention on the use of child soldiers by Uganda’s Joseph Kony in his paramilitary group, the Lord’s Resistance Army. Some have sought to praise this style of campaigning journalism: ‘The millions who watched the “Kony 2012” video — and donated or contacted a legislator — acting individually and however naïvely, might collectively force some big decisions’ [Ref: New York Times]. However, the backlash against the Kony campaign by mainstream media outlets, and its subsequent demise, raise important questions about the dangers of the partial take on events promoted by such campaigns. One writer highlights the problem of social media playing to our desire to feel good ‘in return for not doing very much’, creating a situation where: ‘Facts get lost, vanity goes viral’ [Ref: Independent]. Others warn of a stifling conformity on Twitter which drowns out discussion on certain issues once the ‘collective spite and collective bile’ of a Twittermob is unleashed [Ref: Telegraph]. Though conversely, the ‘many-to-many’ nature of the medium of social media is seen by some as providing a fundamental challenge to vested interests. As one blogger argues: ‘The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair’ [Ref: New Statesman].