Credibility of Social Media Evaluating

Credibility of Social Media

Evaluating Credibility of Social Media

The nature of media relations and the use of modern technology today require that we develop tools to evaluate the credibility of social media as it has become a media outlet which is now necessary for news, commentary, business, and gaining insights about public opinions. For example, as a recent public relations journal article notes, the way public learned about the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in New York City and about the plane crash of U.S. Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson River in 2009 was quite different. Though both were primarily covered by the traditional media, the latter featured more "eye witness" reports via Twitter, Facebook updates, and microblogging by victims and on-lookers (Howes et al.).

This proliferation of social media in everyday reporting requires that journalists and analysts who rely upon it develop tools to evaluate the quality of it. But this is a daunting task as there cannot be one way to evaluate all social media. Besides a general approach that looks at accuracy of the news, information, and data, it is important to develop methods for evaluating social media outlets in their proper contexts. An analyst should ask questions such as: what the news or information is about? Who are posting them? Who can post them? Does the information and data presented in microblogging, for instance, correspond with expert knowledge? For instance, a social media outlet may have been set up by a group of medical scientists, with restricted access to membership, who discuss their field or it may be an open Facebook page dedicated to publicizing the events in Syria. In the latter case, information may be posted by any kind of person and it would be much harder to verify the veracity of what is being posted there.

It does not however mean that valuable insights cannot be gained by reading microblogging or Twitter and Facebook reporting about current events in the Middle East. As experts studying media relations in the Middle East note, the use of social media by ordinary citizens serves a number of purposes. By reading them one can learn about the nature of civic discussion, get an alternative view on events which are usually reported by traditional media tightly controlled by governments. Sometimes, people post hard evidence via social media in the form of videos and photographs which cannot be ignored. Social media reporting and blogging by ordinary citizens also serve as a corrective to foreign media which does not always understand political and cultural dimensions of local stories. And, of course, there is always a risk as information there may be biased, inaccurate, or photos can be doctored, and the entire social media outlet may have been used for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, there is an inherent quality of social media which increases the overall trend toward diversity of views (York).

In a more narrow approach, the quality of social media can be better evaluated in a context it is being used. Silius, Kailanto, and Tervakari present more specific ways of assessing social media quality in an educational context. Social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, the authors note, can be categorized into "content creation and publishing, content sharing, social network sites, collaborative productions, virtual worlds and add-ons" (505). In the educational context, students can contribute content, exchange them with others, and build communities for various needs. The authors evaluate the quality of social media here with the use of a web tool called WeSQu, which is an updated version of ARVO that was used to evaluate the quality of websites before the advent of social media.

WeSQu contains more than four hundred questions in ten different categories to evaluate the quality of websites. The questions and the criteria were developed with the use of previous research in human-computer interaction, theories in psychology and pedagogy, and the evaluation research designed to assess the usefulness of computer systems. WeSQu evaluates such as factors as usability, privacy and security, added value, accessability, the motivating factor, and the information reliability. All of these factors are important for the overall evaluation. Usability refers to the extent the user feels at ease with the interface and the navigation options and it allows the user to concentrate on the content rather than focusing on how to navigate. Authors explain: "When software is usable it is easy and efficient to use, easy to remember, has few errors and is subjectively pleasing" (Silius, Kailanto, and Tervakari 506).

Other categories are equally important. The added value assesses whether there is anything new or special for the user. Accessability is important because social media outlets are designed for individuals who contribute content in different contexts. Privacy and security deals with protecting the users, while the motivating factors looks at how rewarding the participation for the user is, whether it takes into account all users (beginners, advanced users, etc.), whether it provides personalization and maintaining of interest, and whether it makes it easy to follow the development in the media. The web tool evaluates information reliability by assessing "accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage" (Silius, Kailanto, and Tervakari 506).

The approach presented by Silius, Kailanto, and Tervakari is a good example of how the quality of social media may be evaluated within a specific context. But the tools they used in this context may not work properly in other cases. Twitter or Facebook cannot be evaluated by using the same methods. Here again, a specific context is important. As Gayo-Avello explains, generalizing methods and approaches in evaluating social media may lead to inaccurate results. He explains it in the case of evaluating voter preferences in 2008 elections by reading Twitter posts. Twitters posts are used for variety of reasons. Some authors use Twitter data to predict future revenues for newly released movies, while others have used it to predict elections outcomes in the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Germany. But Gayo-Avello explains that the "direct correlation" between Twitter data and future events "is simply not the case" (Gayo-Avello 122).