In this digital age, we use digital media every day, it has become an integral part of our lives, we share life experiences on social media, share daily and opinions. And get some information, mainly Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on. Social media has become our primary platform for communicating credible and acceptable informationWhen we browse social media, we can see all kinds of posts and videos, about cooking, about the culture of countries around the world, about some current affairs and politics, a variety of things, this rich and colorful social media platform allows people to see whatever they want without leaving home, which can not help but trigger people’s thinking, Is social media really providing people with diverse content, allowing people to use social media freely, or are we immersed in the information vortex and guided by algorithms in the information framework they set up.
On this subject, I was inspired after reading Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book provides insight into the political economy behind the media and illustrates how social media serves elites as a powerful tool for shaping public perceptions.Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, first published in 1988..Manufacturing Consent reveals the economics behind social media and how the information presented to us by social media is filtered out, and introduces five filters for filtering social media content.This is the Propaganda Model.Let’s elaborate on how information in social media is sifted through these filters and finally presented to the public.
In the Propaganda Model, the first filter is Ownership. For larger or more authoritative organizations, the views of the owner or senior management of the media organization may have an editorial impact on the news. Other media are owned by large enterprises or some elite elites, who will also promote news that is in line with their own interests, monopolize information that is not conducive to their own interests, and annex or eliminate small media companies. This biases news reporting.
In the Propaganda Model, the second filter is advertising. Have we ever considered a problem, we post content on Facebook or Instagram is actually working for Zuckerberg, when we share some quality and interesting content on social media, we do not think so much, we just want to be seen and liked by everyone, our internal platform attracts a certain number of users, The platform calculates the user’s preferences based on our videos, so as to enter the advertising, which is the main source of income for social media, but it also has to make people worry about their privacy issues. So we’re editing content for Zuckerberg to attract users, and we’re working for him for free. He targets ads through our posts or videos, he gets revenue from advertisers, but we don’t think about that when we use social media.
In the Propaganda Model, the third filter is sourcing.The information we get daily comes from the media, so where does the media get its information? The news of the media comes from the experts, the ideas of the experts dominate the content of the media, and the media carries the views of the experts to the media users, which easily leads to some views being ignored, resulting in information imbalance, resulting in one-sided information with certain bias
In the Propaganda Model, the fourth filter is flak.This means that the media is facing some strong opposition from the society or other interest groups, expressing dissatisfaction with the media coverage, criticizing or putting pressure on the whole organization, some of which can be expressed through protest marches or posts on social media.
In the Propaganda Model, the fifth filter is ANTI-COMMUNISM.The media gave negative and biased coverage to communism and ideas related to it. There is some bias in the media coverage of communism due to some historical influences, which leads them to always be critical of some communist countries when they report on them.
It is interesting when you talk about how algorythems and content are displayed to us and how that may make the difference in proving it is not actually us in control of what we watch but actually behind the scenes we are being shown stuff that influences us majorly. I myself have experiences where I will look up some makeup brand on the internet and then all of a sudden on my TikTok for you page I’ll have many videos of that makeup brand influencing me to buy their product and a good job they do because I buy into it!
It was a very interesting read. It was simply explained and analysed in full. The feature image was great. I benefited from it. Great article