The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump rattled the nation. But do you remember where you first heard about it? I visited the Montana State University campus and asked people where they first got the news.
One woman told me, “Originally I heard about it from a friend.”
Another said, “My husband told me." When I asked where she gets her news from, she replied, “I’d say a variety of places. I think he saw it first on Instagram."
As I walked around campus, people gave me a variety of answers on where they first heard about the assassination attempt, but most of which were social media.
Another woman told me, “It was social media for sure. Either Instagram or TikTok. I don’t particularly watch the news or go on Facebook and look at news sources. But just scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, they just happen to come up."
That's a common answer for most people age 18 to 29, according to Dr. Eric Austin, who has been a political science professor at Montana State for nearly 20 years.
Although Austin says most people who get their news from social media will go on to do further research online, is getting your news from social media in the first place all that bad?
“They’re difficult places to get comprehensive, reliable, balanced news from. The way most social media platforms work is, that algorithm that populates your feed takes information based on your viewing preferences and what you've looked at before, and sort of reinforces that,” says Austin.
Facebook is the number 1 platform, followed by Instagram, then TikTok—all platforms that populate your feed based on this kind of algorithm. So why can this be a problem?
“People gather information from sources they believe are reliable, but it’s incomplete, it’s inaccurate, and it’s just wrong in some instances. And they’re forwarding that on, reposting it, they’re sharing it through their feeds,” says Austin.
Which is known as misinformation: the distribution of information on the belief that it’s accurate. Which shouldn't be confused with disinformation, "Which is inaccurate information that is intentionally distributed to cause confusion,” Austin told me.
Austin says there’s a lot of both misinformation and disinformation circling the internet regarding the assassination attempt.
I asked Austin, “What do you think their goal is?” He told me, “I think there are multiple motivations. The idea of trolls on the internet is kind of well known. I think there are just those who are chaos agents."
So how can you tell if the information you’re reading about the assassination is accurate?
“Any opportunity you have to use news aggregators, to really curate your feed to have not only diverse sources of information, but good reputable sources of information. The more you can broaden your searches, the more you're going to have that complete picture,” says Austin.
But one thing Austin says people should also be aware of? Time.
“At this point, a couple of days in, the reporting that we have is really new. And there's a demand to, and pressure to, get information out as fast as possible. So, I think one of the big things is giving sufficient time to have good, verified, corroborated, accurate reporting," he says.
One source Austin says is a great way to learn about reliable sources: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/?tabItem=b39b851c-e417-48ef-9b10-93ee21a0030e
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