Toby Melville/Reuters
Only 1 in 4 Britons trusts social media. That’s according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer survey. It also found that 64 per cent of UK adults couldn’t tell real journalism from “fake news” on such sites, while 63 per cent said the likes of Facebook aren’t transparent enough. It is a similar picture in the US.
That is a pretty damning verdict. And yet social media, whether we admit it or not, is a mainstay in most of our lives. For instance, 76 per cent of adults in the UK use social media and we spend an average of almost 3 hours a day consuming it. That is a lot of time engaging with platforms we fundamentally don’t trust.
There are many reasons for the declining faith. One major blow was when Buzzfeed found that a slew of