Coronavirus and Social Media

When you see an article do you read the whole thing or do you just read the title and skim through it? Recently there has been a lot of attention drawn to the coronavirus also known as COVID-19. The coronavirus according to dictionary.com is any group of RNA viruses that cause a variety of diseases in humans and other animals. The coronavirus has recently had outbreaks thought the world and now made its way to the United States. The symptoms are very similar to a common cold. In this article it states how people are so eager to share articles that they do not even read but just read the title and skim through it. For this reason the author suggests not to read the articles about the coronavirus. He points out in the article that people read news articles on electronic devices and “the articles are often short due to a lack of attention span from users”. Since writers tend to make articles shorter this does not allow people getting all the information to correctly and fully inform them. Lamoureux, the researcher, noticed that based on the increasing spread and awareness of the coronavirus advertisers try and use this towards their advantage. Lamoureux states “some advertisers are trying to profit off anxiety associated with the illness”. This encourages websites to ban ads that promote things involving the coronavirus. It is recommended to steer clear from websites that are not official and try to get your information from government websites.

https://turnto10.com/news/local/coronavirus-and-social-media-be-careful-what-you-click-on

2 thoughts on “Coronavirus and Social Media

  1. I think that information is definitely being put out that is confusing and misleading which is leading to people not really understanding what true and whats false. To make matters worse there has been misleading comments made of the top of our government which has also confused people. However I wouldn’t say that this issue is exclusive to just the corona virus pandemic and social media , you see things like this all the time in the other media platforms. You could go to five different new channels and get five completely different understanding of the same story. I think recently there has been less focus on the facts of news story and more focus on the less important factors. So my question is how do we as consumer go about not only sorting through what is fact and fiction, and how do we make the media stick to facts and not the story.

  2. Short and dramatic headlines are definitely a prevalent issue during this pandemic, however, they are not exclusive to the coronavirus. This past week, Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign for the 2020 presidential election. Many articles were posted about him “dropping out” of the race, including an article published by the New York Times titled, “Bernie Sanders Drops Out of 2020 Democratic Race for President.” The truth of the matter is Sanders suspended his campaign trail, but people are still able to vote for him in the democratic primaries! In fact, the verified twitter account, People4Bernie, tweeted, “Bernie has not ended his campaign. He’s suspended it. You can and should vote by mail for Bernie Sanders,” while Sander’s personal tweet stated, “please stay in this fight with me.” Regardless of how one chooses to vote, it is still important to acknowledge that the media has distorted the general public’s view of this situation. Although ‘fake news’ has turned into somewhat of a joke, it is always important to question sources and their reliability, as well as their bias (for example: CNN is primarily against President Trump and FOX is generally for Trump.) It is understandable that with users’ attention spans being so short today that the media wants to catch the readers attention while simultaneously portraying a message with as few words as possible. However, it seems wrong that so many writers can make unsubstantiated claims in the headline then ask for forgiveness through explanation deep into the article, as they know so many people will only read the title.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/politics/bernie-sanders-drops-out.html

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