SINGAPORE — For the past decade, Ms Diana Lou has been relying on Facebook for her daily dose of news.
But since the end of last year, the 58-year-old part-time early childhood educator has increasingly found herself having to go directly to the home page of the media outlets that she follows in order to stay abreast of what is happening around the world, instead of simply scrolling through her news feed.“The news feed is sickening. Now there are more and more advertisements. So I make it such that I purposefully go into the page that I’ve followed ,” said Ms Lou.
But the biggest change is set to come as the newest kid on the block, TikTok, turns the industry on its head with features that have propelled the short-video platform into superstardom, especially among the young.Unlike Facebook and other social media apps before it, TikTok, developed by Chinese tech company ByteDance, recommends content based on users’ interests, rather than which accounts they follow.
In Singapore, Facebook officials have recently told newsrooms that it is refocusing its algorithm to distribute content related to entertainment, lifestyle, sports and viral stories — over news and political stories — to users’ feeds. A year later came MySpace, which allowed users to customise their publicly visible profile pages. By 2005, it had 25 million users and was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s media company News Corp.
But the “prank website”, as described by Mr Zuckerberg during a hearing by the United States Congress in 2018, quickly gave way to “The Facebook”. “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next,” they added. The move drove users, including publishers and media companies, to design “clickbait” posts with catchy headlines to boost interaction.
Meanwhile, TikTok, which is rapidly gaining dominance in the social media scene, has signalled that news content will not be a priority on its platform. Dr Wu Shangyuan, a lecturer and media researcher from the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore , also warned of the creation of “filter bubbles”, where users become exposed to a much narrower range of topics and perspectives.
Ms Henson noted that social media users are not ready to read beyond the news headlines and want to be informed immediately about what is happening. In the case of news consumers, the observers highlighted the risk of society becoming less informed if they continue to rely on social media for their news.
“In fact, news article links only make up about 4 per cent of what people see in Feed and people tell us they don’t want political content to take over their experience,” said a Meta spokesperson. As such, YouTube connects viewers to “high-quality information and minimise the chances they’ll see problematic content”, he said.
In its content guidelines circulated to publishers, TikTok specifies that news organisations should include elements such as their logo and banners in their videos, so as to identify the content as news. To ride on the trend, media outlets would do well to adapt to consumer behaviour and establish a presence on the social media platforms, she added.
Ms Henson reiterated that newsrooms should be less reliant on social media platforms' algorithms to disseminate the news. Instead, organisations should find ways to draw their readers back to them everyday, and offer them an incentive to do so such as through offering prizes or with the promise of better content.
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