Citizen Journalism... let's review

Are you as informed as you think you are?

The impacts of citizen journalism can be varied in their positivity and negativity. When posting online, people have the freedom to share their opinions and beliefs and they can act as citizen journalists, there is an allowance to make connections that are healthy and beneficial and inform people about the world around them. However, there is also a major problem with online citizen journalism, these being the prospect of false information, bias, clickbait and ultimately, fake news. The circulation of misinformation, lies, propaganda, and other kinds of falsehood has, to varying degrees, become a challenge to democratic publics (Koc-Michalska et all, 2020). It does seem as if social media platforms are becoming more aware of these negative impacts and are making more considered efforts to police their platforms and improve truth telling.

Like most things, I believe there is good and bad to citizen journalism. But I am a big believer in freedom and this includes free speech where necessary. I understand this is a fine line to walk as freedom of speech also has negative aspects such as increased verbal assault and offensive language. In Australia we are lucky to be able to comment online and journal events around us and around the world to a pretty high and open degree. However, the same cannot be said everywhere else. There are many countries which heavily censor their content such as media and news. This is evident in places such as Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and more.

WeChat

Sourced via: The Japan Times

It may or may not surprise you that Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China, these are western social media platforms and China has an alternative for its citizens: WeChat and QQ. These social media mediums are rather filtered in comparison to the western world’s platforms. While the concept of social media increases in popularity globally, the Chinese government has hinted at a need to censor what information and data their population is able to digest, perhaps feeling threatened.

Control is very important to some countries and governments and this is something that the very concept of citizen journalism threatens. Part of the difficulty rests on the fact that China has the largest number of Internet users of any country, making it challenging for the government to supervise all netizens (Luo, Harrison, 2019). If just anybody can get on some type of platform and inform and educate others, where does that leave governments?

Citizen journalism via the internet creates a varied culture of honesty for countries such as China, as there are negative impacts on being completely in the loop for Chinese citizens.

Reference list:

Koc-Michalska, K., Bimber, B., Gomez, D., Jenkins, M., and Boulianne, S. (2020) "Public Beliefs about Falsehoods in News." The International Journal of Press/Politics, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 447-468.

Luo, YL & Harrison, TMH 2019, ‘How citizen journalists impact the agendas of traditional media and the government policymaking process in China’, SAGE Journals, 25 March, viewed 26 August 2022, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059436419835771.