(Social) media manipulation in one image
kerkour.com45 points by randomint64 3 hours ago
45 points by randomint64 3 hours ago
The first leftmost column of most common causes of death (heart disease, etc) ... would be a "dog bites man" story.
The rightmost columns of media coverage (homicides, terrorism, plane crashes, etc) ... are "man bites dog" stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
It's just the nature of journalism and headlines.
E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..."
But the much more common scenario of "I'm still keeping my social media account active today just like I did yesterday" ... is not submitted -- and nor would it be upvoted to the front page.
Real-life high frequency of normality doesn't make for compelling news.
> It's just the nature of journalism and headlines.
It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth, to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding. If lots of people end up thinking men biting dogs is a bigger problem than dogs biting men, they've failed at that.
They really ought to put up some kind of corrective explanation (sort of like the NYT's disclosures of their lawsuit with OpenAI) in a prominent place of most articles that could leave a wrong impression on readers. That shouldn't be much of a problem for the NYT (which I'm most familiar), because its articles tend to be longer with much more background and context than those of its competitor the Wall Street Journal.
Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs.
When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.
In this shared responsibility model, if the public is mostly responsible, then what can and should be done by the public to fix these issues? And how long will it take? And how would you propose getting the bipartisan support needed, or avoid it becoming a partisan political issue? Are more high school media literacy classes realistically going to fix this problem? Today it feels to me like agenda-driven manipulative reporting is fueling a decrease in media literacy, which appears to be precisely what some people want. What can the public realistically do to counteract this?
That's true, but I don't think the burden can reasonably fall completely on schools and individuals.
I think regular "general disclaimers and PSAs" and necessary to 1) reinforce and refresh the proper lessons and 2) give them to people who never had the proper lessons in the first place.
> It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth, to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding.
It's incumbent that readers/viewers actually want to properly understand the world: Fox News broadcasts the stuff that it does because people want to it, and their ratings / market share is evidence of it.
* https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
* https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/msn...
* https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-politi...
If Fox doesn't supply what their audience demands (e.g., saying "Trump won the election") they'll go someplace else:
* http://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/...
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The main reason for the difference in media coverage is the absence or weakness of a story. How can you build a story around a heart attack? :) On the other side, terrorist attacks, murders, car crashes, and other events are like fermentation jars for stories.
Is there a name for what happens to people who get all their information about the world from these types of sources?
(A similar thing is people who learn about interpersonal relationships from dramatic fictional stories with crazy situations and characters, and get the impression this is what "people are like")
While the image itself is interesting, and indeed points out one of the reasons I don’t watch/read the news from mass media, there are two problems I find with the (clickbait) title:
1. “Manipulation” suggests that outlets are leading people to believe these ratios of causes of deaths, when in fact, they’re just reporting on what they think viewers find more interesting (basically unnatural over natural causes of death).
2. The “(social)” feels misplaced. “Social” media, to me, always represents media shared by others, not by news, via sites and apps like TikTok, FB, Instagram, etc. The image only shows news media (though I’m sure this isn’t far from what the distribution also looks like on actual social media).
Agreed on 2, this problem predates what we call social media.
I also tend to agree with 1, but that’s the actual problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to call it clickbait. The news media shouldn’t be reporting what they think viewers will find interesting, they should be giving an accurate picture of what is happening. We all know how, for example, YouTube’s and Facebook’s engagement algorithms turn your online world into echo chambers. The traditional media has the same problem when they chase engagement at the expense of the whole truth.
For sure there’s a balancing act necessary. The media of course can’t ignore what people want, but they can choose to be a force for truth and still have a viable business. They can choose not to dramatically overexaggerate things that don’t affect us, and they can choose to sprinkle doses of reality and boring stuff amid the drama.
I think I would feel more manipulated re: this distribution of cause of death if I felt like mass media was intending to send the message that homicide and terrorism had higher rates than heart disease or cancer.
I don’t get the impression this is the message they’re intending to deliver. I believe they report on individual stories of homicide and terrorism because it’s more interesting to the public, thus will gain more viewership.
To be clear, I’m not saying mass media isn’t manipulative — in fact, I think they are responsible for much of the misinformation being shared and believed by so many, particularly when it comes to politics.
But if we’re just talking about statistics on the cause of death, I don’t believe they want us to believe homicide/terrorism causes more deaths than heart disease/cancer.
They might not intend to claim homicide is a bigger danger than heart disease, specifically, but that’s effectively what’s happening anyway.
However, they are claiming homicide and terrorism cause more risk and death than they really do, in part because fear is good for their business, and in part because these two specific causes of death are sometimes political vehicles.
The topics of homicide and terrorism wouldn’t actually be as interesting to the public if the media reported on them accurately, and actively worked to show the true risks to the public, especially in relation to heart disease, cancer, and car accidents. The level of public interest depends on the level of reporting!
It becomes social because inevitably it will be shared. They are the source material.
Agreed, but when the source is mass media, they should be attributed the blame, not social media.
Social media is responsible for spreading much more misleading/manipulative information than even mass media would report on.
That is, if we saw a chart of how social media manipulated the news, it would be way more exaggerated than this.
Not defending mass media — I just believe social media can be 10x more misleading than what this chart would have us believe (whereas mass media is already terrible.)
This is so strange to me. It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon. No one cares that the morning commute's traffic is just as it was the day before and the day before that, but they do care that an accident shut down the main highway. It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.
At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time humanities education did.
> It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon.... It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.
News organizations could report on people dying of extremely rare diseases and these are rarely reported on compared to terrorism/homicide.
Rarity is not the best predictor of whether a news organization will cover something. "Likelihood of engagement/rage/shock/fear/anxiety" is the best predictor of story coverage, although this overlaps well with "uncommon happening."
There's absolutely nothing special about news organizations (beyond engaging in 1st amendment activity regularly): they want to make money, they're businesses.
The source article elaborates on the reasons that dramatically over-reporting homicide and terrorism is bad for the public. One of those reasons is that it obscures the actual changes in our lives, it hides what’s truly ‘new’. In that sense, they are fully agreeing with you: news is supposed to communicate on what changed, not what stayed the same. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re supposed to report on the uncommon, but rather they should report on the delta, i.e. what’s different from yesterday.
If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
When I meet my friends and tell them about my last vacation instead of my work, how I slept, and how often I brush my teeth, is that also “manipulation”?
The difference being that while people have a good intuition on one may spend their vacation and what one would talk about, it’s not so easy to extrapolate for other things. Sure, everybody knows that media talks more about homicides and terrorism than the thousands of people dying or „old age“-kind of things, but it’s not always easy to keep in mind on how far apart these numbers are.
I think „manipulation“ may be to strong of a word here, since it assumes intent to manipulate, which is not necessarily to focus on „out of the ordinary“ events. But I think nonetheless that this infographic is interesting and important, because it reminds us that these biases exist and how big they are.
If your friend then believes that work, sleep, and hygiene are not things you did at all because you don't talk about them, then your analogy would be comparable. People believe homicide and terrorism are significantly more common than they are, and vote accordingly. It's affecting all of our lives. Let me know when your vacation stories change public policy, and then I'll start complaining about those.
The problem is that everyone dies some day so there's never going to be equality between causes of death and reporting rates. You might expect some correlation between preventable causes and reporting, and in-part that's what's being seen here.
Why does inevitable death mean there’s never going to be reporting equality on the causes? I don’t understand your logic. The image in the article includes a summary of the top causes, so… it is possible?
Many cancer and heart disease deaths are preventable. There's no direct correlation with preventability. The correlation is with fear and spectacle.
Partly about being preventable, yes, but also about being shocking or dramatic (shootings, crashes, natural disasters).
Odd that the debate here is all around what is in "the news", vs what is in the other tv shows people are watching.
The amount of violence in the stories we watch is astounding; I wonder if that doesn't influence peoples perceptions much more than the news does.
try counting how many times in the last week you saw a gun being drawn (on TV/Netflix/hulu).
For those saying that news is news because it's uncommon, that's kinda true, but the issue is that the availability heuristic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic - means that lots of people take the frequency of a cause on the news and think it roughly applies to the frequency of it in the real world. This forces politicians to treat those uncommon causes as much more common than they are - see the difference in terrorism percentages in the image - and skews the kinds of action they take. If you want politicians to actually have a positive impact on people's lives they should be spending a hell of a lot more attention on heart disease and cancer than terrorism. And the media should be covering breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer treatment much more too. The bias towards negative stories really doesn't help, although that's a bit of a tangent.
The world has changed a lot in the past hundred years. People don't really die violent deaths at the hands of others much any more. Journalism has failed to keep up, and images like this show that very clearly.
I suspect the data from 50 or 150 years ago would be similarly distorted. "Old person dies of old person disease" does not make the news.
Also the idea that homicide rates were much higher a century ago is colored by media and entertainment. The graph on the second page of https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1435670/pdf/p... (PDF) shows homicide rates in the 1970s exceeding that of the prohibition era, which itself was a huge spike over pre-prohibition rates.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. News content, just like all other content, is tracked and analyzed for engagement.
Publishers want to create content that people want to engage with, and we see over and over again that people prefer content that elicits a reaction.
Also, news subscriptions are now seen as a luxury good and not an essential need. Who wants to pay $15/month for a report on how many people died of heart disease this month?
It might be worth paying to get good information free of "engagement farming". But even someone who does pay such a subscription, probably would not read it.
Publishers want to create content that people want to engage with
The number of people engaging with the news has plummeted in the past couple of decades so if that's the goal they're not doing a very good job.
For me the takeaway is not that this is manipulation per se, but that we must understand this bias so that we're not swayed by it. Otherwise you get the current UK situation of many people beleiving most assaults are commited by immigrants and such due to disproportional coverage.
The news should be reporting abnormal causes of death. So I don't think the narrative here is correct.
Maybe take the derivative over time, draw new graphs, and then we're talking.
This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.
> This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.
I don't think it means that. I think it means that when you are done reading an article about an unusual event, you leave with an understanding of how unusual it is, especially relative to more common comparables.
It's not uncommon for someone to be terrified of violent street crime, terrorism, or school shootings but be totally comfortable with getting in a car and driving long distances. There's something wrong with that outcome.
> It's not uncommon for someone to be terrified of violent street crime, terrorism, or school shootings but be totally comfortable with getting in a car and driving long distances. There's something wrong with that outcome.
True enough. I guess with driving it's easier to fool ourselves into thinking we have complete control over our safety.
I don't think it's implying that at all. Especially with the accompanying sentence. The implication is that hyper focusing on news is distorting our perception of normal.
Yeah people should stop watching the "news" it's on the same level as tiktok.
A better comparison would be the same left column (causes of death, by %) and a similar right column: media coverage of these causes of death, by %, BUT only in media coverage which explicitly covers the cause of death as a cause of death, and not in another context.
Just because an article mentions terrorism doesn't mean that terrorism is being covered as a cause of death. Terrorism could be covered wrto. its economic impact.
Same with the flu. The article could be on vaccines.
All these causes of death have so many other newsworthy impacts, so a better comparison would exclude coverage of these causes in the context of their other impacts.
I don't think the general sentiment would necessarily be much different, though. You may very well find that "mass silent killers" get less airtime than other types of news.
It seems like accident's were accidentally left unmanipulated.
I'll add that tone matters. Treating tens of thousands of yearly deaths and horrific injuries in automobile crashes as "just a fact of life, as natural and inevitable as being struck by thunder", does matter a lot to the discourse.
That's not media manipulation (social or otherwise). Even if you don't subscribe to the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra (first commonly used in... the 1890s!), it's not that hard to understand why reporting on uncommon events is more popular than repeating the same baseline truths every day?
Apart form the Washington post, new York Times and fox news are not social media are they
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