Shakira WarrenNews is one click away for millennials who can’t live without the Internet or their smartphones.
Social media serves as a main news source for some people who are foreign to actively seeking out news from other media outlets.
But how are you keeping up with news?
According to the Huffington post, the Media Insight Project released research that 88 percent of millennials use Facebook as their main media source.
But is social media as credible than newspapers, news radio and televised newscasts?
According to Discreet News, a news organization in Utah, social media can be used to get closer to the truth, but it can also be used to distort news.
Getting news from social media isn’t necessarily bad. But it’s important to know the source of the information and to make sure the information you are receiving is not biased and is accurate.
It’s easy to get on social media and scroll on platforms like Twitter and Instagram to keep up with gossip or news events. But it almost as easy to download news apps to credible national news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post and local news organizations like the News & Observer to stay current on the news.
As citizens, keeping up with news is a civic duty. Everyone should be informed about their neighborhoods, their city, their state, and their world.
For example, the North Carolina legislature passed the House Bill 2 in March that prevents transgendered people from using public bathrooms that correlate with their gender identity. The buzz on social media is all about the aspect of HB2.
Consequently, many people think they are unaffected by the law because they are not transgendered.
Not true. HB2 cuts much deeper than that. It actually outlaws local municipalities, such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham, from passing their own anti-discrimination rules and from setting their own minimum wages.
The bill is so strongly anti-equality that executives from Bank of America, American Airlines, Cisco, Miramax, Uber, Google Ventures, and Braeburn Pharmaceuticals have signed an open letter calling for the repeal of HB2, stating that “it sanctioned discrimination across North Carolina” and that such a bill “has no place in North Carolina or anywhere in our country.”
But relying on social media alone doesn’t get you to a full understanding the radical and reactionary nature of HB2. Go deeper. University students have a responsibility to stay on top of what’s happening in out society. How can millennials who only rely on social media be the ones to fix the problems our society faces?
