Many people now get their news from social media rather than from newspapers or television.

Nowadays most people, especially young people, read the news on social media instead of buying a newspaper or watching television. In my opinion, this development is more negative than positive.

There are some advantages. Social media is free and fast: when an earthquake or an accident happens, people know about it in a few minutes, and sometimes ordinary people who are there send photographs and videos before journalists arrive. It is also possible to read news from many different countries, not only from your own government's television channel.

However, the problems are serious. On social media anybody can publish anything, and there is no editor who checks if the information is true. False stories travel very fast because they are shocking, and many people share them without reading the whole article. Later, when the truth appears, most people never see it.

Another problem is that the platform shows you only the news you like. If a person always reads one type of opinion, the system gives him more of the same, so he thinks everybody agrees with him and he never hears different arguments. This makes society more divided.

In conclusion, although social media makes news faster and free, I believe it is a negative development because it spreads false information and shows people only one side of every question.

Social media has become the primary source of news for a large proportion of the population. Although this has made information far easier to reach, I consider the development negative, mainly because of what has happened to the journalism being distributed.

The benefits are genuine. News is now free and immediate, which matters most to people who could never afford a subscription, and coverage is no longer restricted to whatever a national broadcaster chooses to report. During disasters and protests, ordinary participants have repeatedly documented events before professional reporters could reach them, and in countries where broadcasting is controlled, these platforms are sometimes the only route by which information escapes at all.

The difficulty is that platforms rank material by engagement rather than by accuracy. A story that provokes anger is shared more than one that informs calmly, so the selection mechanism systematically favours the most emotive version of any event — not because anyone intends to mislead, but because that is what the ranking optimises for. Verification, meanwhile, has become somebody else's problem: platforms distribute journalism without employing journalists.

The deeper damage is financial. Advertising followed the audience to the platforms, and the revenue that once funded reporting now accrues to companies that gather no news. Local newspapers have closed in enormous numbers as a result, and with them the routine coverage of councils, courts and local government that nothing has replaced.

In conclusion, I regard the change as negative overall. The distribution of news has improved considerably, but the system that produced it has been defunded in the process.

Assessing this shift requires separating two things that are usually merged: how news reaches people, and who produces it in the first place. Social media transformed the first and quietly undermined the second, and because the second is what makes the first worth having, I regard the development as negative — despite the distribution itself being a clear improvement.

The gains deserve proper acknowledgement. News is now immediate and free at the point of access, which matters most to precisely the people who were previously priced out of it. The range available to any individual is vastly wider than a single national broadcaster could offer, and where states control the media, these platforms have repeatedly been the channel through which information reached the outside world. Ordinary witnesses have also documented events that professional reporters could not have reached in time — a genuine addition to the record, not merely a faster version of it.

The problem with the ranking mechanism is not that platforms wish to spread falsehood but that they optimise for engagement, and engagement is not correlated with accuracy. Material that provokes indignation is shared more readily than material that informs, so the sorting process reliably surfaces the most emotive account of any event. Nobody has to intend this outcome for it to occur every day at scale, which is why it has proved so resistant to fixes framed as content moderation.

The more consequential harm, however, is economic. Reporting is expensive and its benefits are diffuse — a court report or a council investigation is valuable to a community that will never pay the reporter directly. Advertising historically solved that problem by attaching the cost to the audience; when advertising migrated to platforms that distribute journalism without commissioning any, the funding was severed from the production while the product continued to be consumed. That is free-riding on an industrial scale, and its effect is visible: local newspapers have closed in vast numbers, and the routine accountability journalism they performed has simply stopped, without any replacement emerging.

My verdict, then, is negative, but the target is specific. The failure is not that people read news on their phones — that is merely a better delivery mechanism — nor even that some of what they read is false. It is that the mechanism which paid for the reporting has been captured by intermediaries who do none of it, and no adequate substitute has appeared. A society can survive a noisier information environment; it does considerably worse without anybody attending the council meeting.