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(Social) media manipulation in one image

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Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#31

Post by HPsquared »

jasode wrote: post #18

The first leftmost column of most common causes of death (heart disease, etc) ... would be a "dog bites man" story. The rightmost columns of media coverage (homicides, terrorism, plane crashes, etc) ... are "man bites dog" stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog It's just the nature of journalism and headlines. E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..." But the…

Is there a name for what happens to people who get all their information about the world from these types of sources?

(A similar thing is people who learn about interpersonal relationships from dramatic fictional stories with crazy situations and characters, and get the impression this is what "people are like")

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#32

Post by haritha-j »

For me the takeaway is not that this is manipulation per se, but that we must understand this bias so that we're not swayed by it. Otherwise you get the current UK situation of many people beleiving most assaults are commited by immigrants and such due to disproportional coverage.

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#33

Post by jader201 »

figassis wrote: post #25
jader201 wrote: post #22

While the image itself is interesting, and indeed points out one of the reasons I don’t watch/read the news from mass media, there are two problems I find with the (clickbait) title: 1. “Manipulation” suggests that outlets are leading people to believe these ratios of causes of deaths, when in fact, they’re just reporting on what they think viewers find more interesting (basically unnatural over natural causes of dea…

It becomes social because inevitably it will be shared. They are the source material.

Agreed, but when the source is mass media, they should be attributed the blame, not social media.

Social media is responsible for spreading much more misleading/manipulative information than even mass media would report on.

That is, if we saw a chart of how social media manipulated the news, it would be way more exaggerated than this.

Not defending mass media — I just believe social media can be 10x more misleading than what this chart would have us believe (whereas mass media is already terrible.)

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#34

Post by onion2k »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #9
onion2k wrote: post #6

The world has changed a lot in the past hundred years. People don't really die violent deaths at the hands of others much any more. Journalism has failed to keep up, and images like this show that very clearly.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. News content, just like all other content, is tracked and analyzed for engagement. Publishers want to create content that people want to engage with, and we see over and over again that people prefer content that elicits a reaction. Also, news subscriptions are now seen as a luxury good and not an essential need. Who wants to pay $15/month for a report on how many people died of heart…

Publishers want to create content that people want to engage with

The number of people engaging with the news has plummeted in the past couple of decades so if that's the goal they're not doing a very good job.

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#35

Post by dahart »

alpha_squared wrote: post #15

This is so strange to me. It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon. No one cares that the morning commute's traffic is just as it was the day before and the day before that, but they do care that an accident shut down the main highway. It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual. At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time hu…

The source article elaborates on the reasons that dramatically over-reporting homicide and terrorism is bad for the public. One of those reasons is that it obscures the actual changes in our lives, it hides what’s truly ‘new’. In that sense, they are fully agreeing with you: news is supposed to communicate on what changed, not what stayed the same. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re supposed to report on the uncommon, but rather they should report on the delta, i.e. what’s different from yesterday.

If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.

https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#36

Post by palmotea »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #19

This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.

> This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.

I don't think it means that. I think it means that when you are done reading an article about an unusual event, you leave with an understanding of how unusual it is, especially relative to more common comparables.

It's not uncommon for someone to be terrified of violent street crime, terrorism, or school shootings but be totally comfortable with getting in a car and driving long distances. There's something wrong with that outcome.

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#37

Post by koakuma-chan »

MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #26
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #19

This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.

I don't think it's implying that at all. Especially with the accompanying sentence. The implication is that hyper focusing on news is distorting our perception of normal.

Yeah people should stop watching the "news" it's on the same level as tiktok.

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#38

Post by jawns »

palmotea wrote: post #30
jasode wrote: post #18

The first leftmost column of most common causes of death (heart disease, etc) ... would be a "dog bites man" story. The rightmost columns of media coverage (homicides, terrorism, plane crashes, etc) ... are "man bites dog" stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog It's just the nature of journalism and headlines. E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..." But the…

> It's just the nature of journalism and headlines. It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth , to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding. If lots of people end up thinking men biting dogs is a bigger problem than dogs biting men, they've failed at that. They really ought to put up some kind of corrective explanation (sort of like the NYT's disclosures of…

Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs.

When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#39

Post by FeteCommuniste »

palmotea wrote: post #36
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #19

This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.

> This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events. I don't think it means that. I think it means that when you are done reading an article about an unusual event, you leave with an understanding of how unusual it is, especially relative to more common compara…

> It's not uncommon for someone to be terrified of violent street crime, terrorism, or school shootings but be totally comfortable with getting in a car and driving long distances. There's something wrong with that outcome.

True enough. I guess with driving it's easier to fool ourselves into thinking we have complete control over our safety.

Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image

#40

Post by zugi »

onion2k wrote: post #6

The world has changed a lot in the past hundred years. People don't really die violent deaths at the hands of others much any more. Journalism has failed to keep up, and images like this show that very clearly.

I suspect the data from 50 or 150 years ago would be similarly distorted. "Old person dies of old person disease" does not make the news.

Also the idea that homicide rates were much higher a century ago is colored by media and entertainment. The graph on the second page of https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1435670/pdf/p... (PDF) shows homicide rates in the 1970s exceeding that of the prohibition era, which itself was a huge spike over pre-prohibition rates.

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