When created, social media's main intention was to bring people a platform where they could share their lives, memories, ideas, opinions, and everything else they wanted to share. As expected, different social networks started emerging, and competition between them to have the most appealing interactive platform appeared as well. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most extensive social networks nowadays, and they both include a news section to keep users updated with the world's latest essential events. However, news articles are available for users' consumption differently, determined by the networks' page design and interactive style.
Facebook has been characterized as a fun social media to connect with friends and family through an easy-to-use platform. The news section can be easily located at the bottom or top of the page (depending on the device you are using). Once you click, the page loads all the relevant news for you in a panel view. Users also can look at the news by topic, which makes the search more straightforward. Despite being a friendly platform, Facebook does not contain full news articles, but it redirects the users to the original news publication on the sources' websites. Facebook does know how to apply rhetorical strategies. It sends users personalized content based on their interests, which makes people feel special and contains emoticons, gifts, and memes that help people express their feelings and emotions. Of course, on Facebook, we find a lot of false content, so it is necessary to apply good content evaluation strategies to not be fooled or fall into misinformation.
On the other hand, Twitter is well known for being a social network with a more serious and formal character than its competitors. Of course, we can also find fake news and content, but its platform is generally more professional. The Twitter news section is located on the right side of the computer in a list. You also have the option to search for news by topic. This is the best social network to get news, as the blogger Caroline Forsey points out,
"About 71% of Twitter users say they use the platform to get news."
Regularly the news is small paragraphs of information accompanied by a photo or video and a link that redirects you to the page containing the information or full article. Twitter is more informative than Facebook in terms of news, because you can see both news of social interest and personalized news in the feed, while Facebook is dominated by news based on your personal likes and dislikes. Twitter has done a great job with logic (logos) in terms of rhetoric by following the same line of presentation for all its sections.
In the end, even though Twitter is more specialized in news sharing, it is up to the individual users to determine which social network they find most attractive and reliable for keeping up to date with what is happening in our world.
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