Television is fast, frenetic, and tends to be brevity. Speed is sought and is achieved thanks to its structure: the images enter by themselves. There is no need to explain them, so there is no need to recreate them either. In addition, television is a medium that is not created to inform but to entertain. For this reason, because entertainment is the basis of its existence when it reports, it does so by instilling its own system into the news: brevity, shocking images, and a succession of events that allows it to maintain the frenetic pace.
In his article, Hossein Derakhshan states, "Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogs and made the Internet like television: centralized and image-centric, with content embedded in images, without links." They put aside the possibility of disagreeing with the contents because the way of wrapping reality did not lend itself to it. And that is when the "viral news" was born. And when that "virality" lent itself to becoming a platform for distributing hoaxes, false news, lies, and ideological radicalism. Because nobody needs to check if something is true: it is enough to share it if it has awakened your most basic emotional (and human) instincts. Because it is the era of visual impact with brevity. The end of the links to check or expand the facts. The arrival of an era in which the media produces content that they distribute on the platform of another, coexisting with the content produced by individuals who hold the same rank on the credibility scale. Social media are the democracy of content, where reality and lies have the same structure and the same labels, and where only the initiative of each one decides what to take as truth and what to take as a lie. Where time never passes and what has already happened comes back like a boomerang, even sponsored by the media.
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