By: Tamar Belfont

It’s not a shocker that Twitter is playing a massive role in the news these days. Many Presidential candidates get coverage trading barbs through Twitter. Many news outlets often tweet first, then post online to other sites then print. In today society, our current president of the United States keeps everyone update and connected with him via Twitter. President Trumps makes all his big announcements on social sites and Twitter is his well known one. Twitter a safe zone for many news outlets. Twitter’s biggest impact on news coverage is reporters make minute-by-minute decisions on what they publish and who reads it versus the old days when a small group of editiors held that power over what went into the next day’s paper. Twitter can post any thing without any actual fact check. Therfore, it makes it hard for many readers to understand the truth versus the false. Twitter is a free-will site. For example, a fake account can publish anything on their account containing the news and it is up to society and journalist to distinguish the truth from the fake.

Twitter also gives nespapers more immediacy. For example, according to Craig Chambelain “ When a gunman started shooting at a Colorado movie theather, The Denver Post’s first 24 hours of coverage was broken sololey on social media plateforms like Twitter because the print edition was already on the delivery trucks.” Twitter sometimes tends to out beat us when it comes down to publishing news. Twitter does not do actual fact checks but instead post their opinion and news to the world. Twitter does not follow nor have the same rules that apply to journalist before publishing news worthy information.

Twitter can give journalist a chance to expand on their jobs. When you hear someone going to school for journalism, your first instant is their going to be a reporter or writer but instead Twitter expanded their traditional jobs. An Atlanta editor gained 500 news followers for the Journal- Constitution when she tweets about her favorite sport figure skating and that is something the paper’s sports section had ignored. As journalist I agree we need to disengage from the daily rhythms of Twitter because Twitter can has it’s pros and cons. I perfer scrolling down Twitter and keeping on to update with the news and current events instead of reading a large spacious newspaper on the train. Twitter gets information out sometimes fastier than the New York Times, The Daily News because they don’t need an approval from an editor on their work. They just automatically post their news once they hear about it. Twitter does not care of it is false or accurate news as long as it published on the social site.

In “The Brain Lehrer Show” professor Sophia Rosenfield discuss many different issues we still deal with today in our society. The economic changes has made journalist harder and harder to maintain and give real truthful information. It has got a lot harder for us to figure out the difference between real and fake news nowadays. Technology and social media has played a massive role as to why reporters and journalism is dying slowly. It is hard to figure out which source is more trust worthy. Social media is apart of human beings everyday life but it looks like there are other people finding the interest of social media. Bot help to propogate fake news as well as inflate the apparent popularity of fake news on social media. Plateforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram have become a home to millions of social bots that spread fake news. We tend to sometimes believe the fake news because no one is being called out on it about the news. I agree with this podcast because we need to do better in removing fake news instead of ingoring it. Bots are algorithms that is set of logic step to complete a specific task that works in online social networks sites to execute tasks autonomously and repetitively.

Bots are becoming more and more smarter than majority of us because of their artificial skills and intelligence. We have machine learning, which is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. It is a branch of artificial intelligence based on the idea that system can learn from data and identify patterns and makes deicisions with minimal humans intervention but of course in order for this to work we need to teach the machine to work correctly.

In “The Brain Lehrer Show” Sophia Rosenfield brings an arugement about popular opinon and expert knowledge. Nowadays we live in a society we can get our news access from the news or even sometimes social media websites such as Twitter to give us today’s news. People are likely to read news written by non creditable sources instead of recieving factual important from a expert with knowledge. Why would someone trust Twitter over The Daily News. The New York Times are well educated, college graduate, knowledge experts writers who are being published but readers rather listen to popular opinon on social media.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton