00:17Welcome to the brave new world of social media where most of us get our news and political
00:26information the upside is we get to participate in this conversation as never before we comment
00:33we share we tweet we retweet but our favorite social networks have also amped up the power
00:39of the opinionators sometimes this activates us and sometimes it feeds us distortion it's just a
00:52stupid opinion i mean it's a misunderstanding my name is juana summers and i'm an editor for cnn
00:58politics based in washington dc one of the great things and one of the horrible things about social
01:03media is that everybody can have their say it's kind of a marketplace of ideas and some voices
01:07that sometimes are not correct or have a very partisan slant can oftentimes get amplified it
01:13wasn't always this way with trayvon martin's killing in 2012 by george zimmerman we saw a new pattern of
01:21coverage emerge trayvon's death became a meme that led to an agenda war on social media and a now
01:27familiar shouting match on cable television with wildly diverging narratives based on where you
01:32turned or clicked jim rutenberg media columnists the new york times we are in a whole new world where
01:39twitter facebook and social media are driving coverage nationwide so cnn fox msnbc is going to
01:48pick one side and if enough people like the way it sounds and want to believe it it's off to
01:54the
01:54races the wheels are in motion for a complete character assassination of trayvon martin behaving
01:59in a thuggish manner assaulting george zimmerman thug how about the guy who chased down the 17 year
02:06old and shot him in the chest what we want when we're covering race is some kind of national
02:10conversation that leads us somewhere good but if you're only going with the divided take
02:15us against them right against left it's hard to see us coming to some place of reconciliation
02:22now that we can program our own news diet online it's even easier to seek out what we want to
02:28believe
02:29the irony is that instead of expanding our worldview social networks can easily become
02:35accomplices in shrinking it i'm brooke gladstone the co-host and managing editor of on the media
02:41a national program produced by wnyc there is a tendency in the digital media for a heightened
02:48phenomenon to occur incestuous amplification if you are in an echo chamber where you're only
02:56speaking to like-minded people it tends to heighten the extreme voices and marginalize the moderate ones
03:03it creates an atmosphere that is incredibly intolerant online and if facebook is your go-to news source
03:10it pays to understand how it works facebook's main goal is to keep you on its site its algorithm
03:17is set up to give you what you want an algorithm is a formula that facebook engineers have put together
03:24to maybe even know what you like before you know what you like if you don't relish the idea of
03:30a
03:30computer algorithm responding to your likes and dislikes you have to figure out how to curate your news
03:37for yourself certainly the news choices that you make will help determine your view of an event of
03:44the world even more important your view of the world determines what your news choices are it really
03:52begins with you so the question is what do you do i would love it if i could tell every
04:00person in america
04:01to read something you violently disagree with once a week if you're a diehard msnbc watcher go turn on fox
04:07if you love to read breitbart and town hall go listen to npr for a day maybe there's something there
04:13for you
04:13to challenge your assumptions and the things that you typically read you can employ deputy curators on twitter
04:19say you find people who are experts in the areas that you care about going beyond the usual suspects
04:27and actually clicking further distances than you normally do if you're just swiping through your
04:33facebook or your twitter go past the headline or the image that you're seeing and ask what's the full
04:38story what's the source of the information and just being really critical of that today it only takes a
04:43minute to google something you see online and find out if it's been updated or fact checked don't
04:49reflexively retweet you are feeding back into the system that is feeding into you you're a part of this
04:55now the great news about the advent of social media is that there is more information at your
05:02fingertips you can take advantage of that and you can be the best informed citizen in history
05:06in the digital age everyone with a keyboard can be a creator or distributor of content we have more
05:13power than ever and with that comes responsibility it's on us to be our own media keepers and to engage
05:20thoughtfully in the evolving landscape of digital democracy
05:24you
