To understand the wording Social Media we have to take a closer look on what is meant to it. Social media ist the collective of online communication channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content –sharing and collaboration. Also what comes with it are websites and apllications dedicated to forums, microbloccing, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation and wikis are among the different types of social media. The Globald digital Report 2016 published by the digital agency „We are social“ which basis are statistics and trends from 30 countries shows that 46% of the world population uses the internet and even more use the mobile internet. And it also shows us that social media is used by a third and nearly the same number use social media with mobile devices. So social media use via smartphone gets more and more important in our daily life. As a result we can be online and consume information 24 hours a day. But what kind of information are these. Today more than 70% of all digital information is created by the consumer himself and comes from outside the corporate world. That’s a big difference to the past in which publishers and editors checked the content to publish. So when you get your infomation from social media for example from forums, blogs, wikis, or comments a lot of the information hasn´t been verified by an higher instance. Besides the fact that people use Social media to connect and interact it gets more and more important as a daily Newssource. The „reuters digital News Report which asked 2000 internet users representative over years comes to a very interesting result. This year social media platforms have overtaken the print newspaper as the most favorite regulary used newssource in Germany. From the 50 Millon adult Onliner in Germany 31 % use social networks as favorite newssource and only 29% the printed newspaper. Even though the newespapers are present in the social networks, many people don´t notice them as a brand itsself especially when they see them in a news timeline like we have it on facebook.

Nowadays social Media platforms for example Facebook summs up a lot of information from the digital world. It´s like an window to the digital world. But what many people forget is that these plattforms are driven by alghorithms that are designed to show you the best personalised content for you. How these alghorithms manipulate the content you see is often not regognized in the daily use. Facebook often changes the algorithms. In summer 2016 they announced to have the priority on content that your friends shared a lot so that you don´t miss content of people that stand close to you.

But not only in social media algorithms play an important role …..

by Maximiliane Paulus, Christina Scheben, Fredrik Larsson, Stefanie Rager