Guess what? Fake news sucks. It’s terribly destabilizing to know that there are media sources out there telling us outright lies while claiming to be objective journalists. I think everyone agrees on that. Here’s where my hot take comes in: the fake news era is having a great impact on young people.
Let me explain. There used to only be 2 or 3 channels on TV and a few reputable papers that people got their daily news from. And for the most part, that generation trusted those sources. I mean their influence was so vast that you’d be considered a conspiracy theorist simply for not believing them. So I think there’s definitely a naïveté among that generation in the 60’s and 70’s that has to be acknowledged. And that’s because using media to promote your political agenda, malevolent or not, isn’t a 21st century thing. That has always existed. But people weren’t always as woke to it as the youth of today is.
In fact if you look at the demographics of current cable news audiences, the Nielsen data shows us that the typical viewer comes exactly from that older, more naive generation. According to Nielsen, the median age of CNN viewers is 60 and then 65 for both Fox and MSNBC. And guess what else. When it came to sharing fake news in the 2016 election cycle, Science Advances data indicates that Facebook users aged 65 and higher were 7 times more likely to share articles from fake news websites than adults 29 and younger.
See what I’m getting at?
Young people today are a skeptical generation. Sadly, I think right now maybe it’s contributing to a lot of the tension among us in these polarized times. And yeah of course, you could probably find a scientific paper or statistic to support any narrative that fits your agenda. But I’d rather have us arguing with stats than sitting complacently, absorbing lies from our screens. If nothing less, that’s more conducive to a productive debate. So, damn right I think there is something good coming out of the “age of fake news.”
How do we see this prominent skepticism already manifesting itself in popular culture? That’s easy. Go on Twitter and see how quick my generation is to call each other out on their bullshit. Go on Twitter and see how quickly climate change deniers get called out for their claims no matter what kind of statistic they dug through 4chan to find.
So it’s good that we’re learning to be suspicious of news we read, see, or hear. For now. But the long run is where the real challenge comes in. If there’s ever enough of a socio-political divide that we can’t agree on any facts at all, then how can we fix any problems that affect us all? You can’t put together a puzzle if you don’t all agree on the shapes of the pieces.
Frank Ocean has a lyric from a song called We All Try that goes “You gotta believe in something. I still in believe in man.” I agree with Frank. But it might take extreme circumstances to pull together our belief in each other.
**also new Frank album soon please 😩**
Filip, again.
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