According to a recent survey, social media is the primary source of information for young people in Gen Z, on a par with websites and television. Adwise has observed this through its Gen Z community. This is a complicated phenomenon to understand for the over-35s, who overwhelmingly prefer traditional audiovisual media to form their opinions.
Hence the enormous responsibility of Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter in this area! Except that social media are in no way media sites, and the information they circulate is not necessarily published by journalists who have checked their sources.
Heavily criticised for his management - or rather his "non-management - of false information during the US presidential election - the notorious Fake News - Facebook is now trying to get back on track, having recently deleted around thirty thousand French accounts. "not authentic In other words, robots spreading rumours that may or may not be true.
More recently, Facebook has also promoted its 10 "tips for identifying false information and those reported as such may be passed on to outside journalists for verification... but will not be deleted.
The problem is that many botnets slip under the radar of security specialists: recently, researchers accidentally discovered a network of over 350,000 fully automated Twitter accounts broadcasting Star Wars quotes!
And totally invisible to conventional detection systems. Not really, as the authors were certainly testing the effectiveness and limits of the security systems in place before exploiting the loopholes for less superficial purposes.
Such means place the perpetrators in the context of large-scale disinformation - the kind of disinformation of which the Russian secret services were accused during the American presidential election, for example... and possibly the French one, although it is difficult to know and to provide proof.
Disinformation more "current"These rumours are all the more difficult to invalidate because their denunciation generally reinforces them - this is the very nature of rumours, as Jean-Noël Kapferer has already pointed out in : Rumours, the world's oldest mediajust 30 years ago.
Until a few years ago, these rumours were circulated mainly via e-mail chains - a medium more suited to the older generation; today they can be found in identical form on the social web, which is massively frequented by the younger generations.
The question we can - or should - ask ourselves is whether young people will be receptive to Facebook's recommendations and, above all, whether they will be able to develop the intellectual tools they need to distinguish between what is true and what is false.
There are some excellent sites like hoaxbuster.com to check the quality of dispatches that seem suspicious to us: you have to already have a doubt! And all this can be very time-consuming: not sure that Gen Z has the time, or wants to take the time, to check.
For some people, it will become second nature to be wary of over-hyped titles, to research the source, to watch out for unusual formatting, and so on: but how many?
Fortunately, the future does not necessarily have to take a dystopian form: there are two possible scenarios.
1er In this case, social media are becoming fully aware of their informative role, which goes beyond simply being relational, and are equipping themselves with a range of new tools. "editorial committees - Whatever you call it - to hunt down false information by cross-checking it - by carrying out real journalistic verification work, which their immense resources allow them to do.
2th In this case, they adopt a more lax policy and lose all credibility - including with the younger generation: if the traditional media play their cards right, they will win back an audience that today prefers free but dubious systems.
But the current situation cannot continue, or so we hope.
