Thread by @baekdal

I see a lot of media people sharing the latest Monday Note article, the one blaming social media.

First of all, I love the Monday Note. It's on my list of "primary" publication that I read everything from. But...

I have a few words about the latest article [thread]

First a link to the original, if you haven't seen it: mondaynote.com/trust-in-news-…

But... the overall premise of the article is two things.

First, that the distribution model directly correlates with trust in media. Generally, I would say that this is true. The more you can get people to connect with you directly, the more trust you also have.

This, however, is not surprising, because when people come to you directly, it implies a level of intent ... and if you don't have that, well, then we already have much bigger problems.

Secondly, it tries to blame social media for a low level of trust. This, however, is not something that I see any reliable data for.

In fact, I often see the opposite. There are three things to mention here.

First is this graph, which tries to link trust to the '[media] brands have avoided the dilution in social media'.

I'm sorry, but this is bonkers, and I can debunk this really quickly.

Take Denmark vs France.

In Denmark, percentage-vise, people use social media *more* than in France, so clearly more social media use does not correlate with less trust. If it did, countries like Denmark would have terrible trust scores compared to France.

Monday Note also highlights certain events, like Brexit, causing low trust. We saw a similar thing promoted by the Guardian yesterday saying that Boris Johnson came to power because of social media.

Again, I can debunk this very easily. We know, for instance, percentage-wise, that the people who voted "remain" were younger and therefore also use social media more, whereas those who voted for "Leave" were older... and thus use social media less.

So blaming social media channels for Brexit is bonkers. I'm not saying it didn't have a role, but clearly, if the people who use it the most weren't the ones who voted to "leave", then that conclusion can't be made. There must have been other and more significant factors.

And let's not forget that it's the old people who share most of the fake news. The same old people who have a higher tendency to read ... I don't know, the Daily Mail or in the US watch Fox News.

Finally, we have the trends for trust in the media over time. I have been monitoring this for ... well ... something like 15 years, well before social media as we know it today even became a thing. And you know what I see?

I see that, over time, the trust in media directly correlates with the political stability of a country, and that whenever the trust in politics goes down, trust in media goes down with it. This is happened both before and after social media, and I see no change in this trend.

So thinking that 'social media' is causing this, ignores all the data we have before social media was even a thing. If social media was truly to blame, we would be able to see a change in the overall pattern, but I don't see that in the data.

What really annoys me though is how we then respond to this in the media. Over the past 24 hours, I have seen several media people share this Monday Note article, and it's a well-argued article. But those sharing it chooses only to pick out what they wanted to hear.

Here is what Brian Stelter tweeted:

But here is the actual quote from the article: "There are many other considerations to take into account to explain the degrading trust in media. One sure thing, though: the damages inflicted by all forms of social medial have been tremendous."

Did you see that? The article specifically says: "There are many other considerations", but what I see on Twitter is media people completely ignoring that and instead tweet in such a way that you put the blame solely on social media.

This is misinformation. You are cherry-picking the information and withholding important factors, in order to try to get people to believe this is only about social media.

It's journalistic malpractice.

As a media analyst, I see this every day, and it annoys me more than anything. As media professionals, we should be better than this. I don't care if you don't like social media, as a media professional, we have a duty to conduct ourselves with perspective and clarity.

I can understand if other people do this, but I cannot accept it when we in the media do it. And it's offensive.

My only conclusion about this is that it's complicated. There are plenty of things that are bad on social media, and there are plenty of things that are bad in the media, but there are also so many outside factors at play.

For instance, why would a small UK town who relied heavily on UK grants vote overwhelmingly to leave the EU? How the heck did that happen?

How come people in that town, where the newspaper readership was higher (percentage-wise) than in London come to that outcome? It's an important question that requires more thought than just "Oh it's because of Facebook".

Correction: Two tweets earlier it should obviously say "who relied heavily on *EU* grants"

@Twitter, where is that Edit button???