Facebook and Instagram are the two social media platforms that I use the most and are therefore the most familiar with. Embarrassingly, these are the platforms I probably use to receive most of my news. Facebook’s news feed is set up to display what your friends and family are liking, commenting on, and sharing. Even posts or articles that are not shared by your friend will appear in your feed, and you can see that x,y, and z from high school ‘like’ Fox News or NPR or Donald Trump. This serves as a reinforcement to jump on the bandwagon and ‘like’ this post. They also control what appears in their feed. For example, Facebook took down a Trump ad because it was using a Nazi symbol. "We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol," Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, told CNN Business.
Instagram’s feed is more personalized, and you have much more control over what you see. I follow several news outlets and reporters that share news, so I am still coming across it in my scrolling, but I generally know what to expect and from whom.
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