The New Too Big to Fail

[Commentary] The Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of US adults get news on social media, including 18 percent who do so often – that's up sharply from just four years ago when the figure was 49 percent. Fully two-thirds of US Facebook users get news from the site (up from 47 percent just three years ago); that's roughly 44 percent of the population, according to Pew – which is more than the cumulative news reach of YouTube (10), Twitter (9), Instagram (4), LinkedIn (4), Reddit (2), Snapchat (2) and Tumblr (1), the next seven biggest social media news sources. And Facebook only in 2015 passed Google as the biggest referrer of Internet traffic to news sites.

This is in part, as I've noted previously, that in an age of widespread perceived media bias and mistrust of journalists, search engines and social media platforms are viewed as dispassionate and unbiased sorters of the news – a 2012 Pew study, for example, found that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe search results are unbiased. And a study released by Edelman earlier this year found that 60 percent of those surveyed trust Google for news more than actual news outlets. But while big social media – be it Facebook or Google News – has news-purveying components they're not news organizations as such and don't have news missions. They're part of larger companies with agendas that don't necessarily include fairly informing the citizenry. And they have real power, regardless of whether they're using it or not.