THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
nationthailand

Social media seize the moral high ground

Social media seize the moral high ground

Dwindling trust in mainstream sources and the immediacy of the Internet have tilted the information axis

Newspapers are going out of business one by one, the broadcast news media are struggling financially and, in part because of their dire situation, many outlets in both types of conventional media have yielded the high moral ground, inviting their own doom. During the course of 2016, print and television news continued to witness the unstoppable rise of the social media, usurping their traditional role as sources of information, along with their revenues and even their claim to moral righteousness.
While the social networks strive to contain the unchecked flood of fake news, their sheer ubiquity and ability to keep friends, family and other contacts connected as never before put them well ahead of traditional news sources in shaping public opinion. With the US presidential election, the mainstream media sacrificed forever their reputation for perceptiveness, their confidence in a Hillary Clinton victory turned into humiliation with the stunning triumph of Donald Trump.
In the course of the campaign there were endless editorials and commentaries in favour of Clinton and ridiculing Trump’s chances, none of which had the least effect on the outcome. The social networks, in spite of all the partisan hostility on open display (and also because of it), turned out to be a better gauge of the electorate’s mood.
Meanwhile in Thailand, the social media – with their overnight viral outrages – proved far quicker than the mainstream media in seeing wrongdoers brought to justice, as both common criminals and celebrity thugs discovered.
The economic blow that the sharing networks first delivered to the conventional media has now been joined by a claim to moral superiority and sounder reason. If the mainstream media outlets can no longer be trusted as voices of reason, people instead base their moral judgements on what friends and relatives share online, a form of peer alignment that’s shaping consensus in an unprecedented way.
This isn’t entirely surprising. Apart from trusting those we know, we naturally seek out the sources with the greatest amount of information. That has always been the mainstream media, but no longer. As much as the public might still value the traditional media, they have been let down too often to fully trust them regarding basic news, let alone look to them for moral guidance. It seems unlikely that newspapers and broadcast news can ever regain this lost ground, and the coming year will probably see the social media consolidate their new-found moral authority.
Any user of the networks will acknowledge that the modern media platforms are full of misinformation and overly self-righteous people. Facebook, Twitter and the like teem with liars, braggarts and salesmen, and this does undermine the networks’ moral authority. The same “moral panic” that arises in the mainstream media is found among the social media as well.
Yet, despite such drawbacks, the social networks are on the threshold of replacing their mainstream counterparts as a key moral force in society. Where your online friends have offered advice on where to dine and what car on the market is best, they now help guide you about what’s right and wrong. Again, this is a role that’s been taken away from newspapers, television and radio, and the new sources – always ready at your fingertips – have become just as trusted, if not more so.
The US election coverage demonstrated how the shift in trust to the social media might affect the workings of democracy. Democratic societies have always looked to the Fourth Estate for ideological (read: moral) guidance and they in turn have reflected public sentiment. Now there is a Fifth Estate, quicker to inform, more accessible, more widely shared and more trusted.

RELATED
nationthailand