Research Microsite
What is the impact of news on social media on the mood of the youth?
We conducted research and tried to find an answer to the question "What is the impact of news on social media on the mood of the youth?" It's a topic that is becoming more and more prominently present it today's society. The influence of news on social media could fundamentally change the way we think, and thus could change the way or society develops. The results were very interesting.
The process of our research was documented on this site. You can find all data here, or via the links below.
On the about page you can read a little more about the researchers.
Primary research
Secondary research
Insights #
We have gained a lot of insights during our research. Some confirmed out initial thoughts, while others were new info we hadn't considered yet. We wrote down individual insights per post, but we've also put them below.
People don't realize how much time they spend online until they really think about it en look it up. It's amazing how technology has become something we just use without thinking about it. Social media to be specific has become a staple in our daily lives but in the responses we noticed that some people don't really want social media to be such a big part of their lives.
We see that Instagram is becoming huge, in Belgium it's the most popular platform and also in the English survey it came in the top 3. The biggest difference between Instagram en other social media platforms is that Instagram is picture based. This makes media consumption even quicker leading to bigger amounts of information being processed by youth.
Youth is pretty cautious while reading news on social media. They check for facts and don't just go with whatever is being published.
Both people we interviewed used social media to actually boost their mood, which wasn't something we expected. Especially setting a mood to help study or relax was an interesting insight we found.
They both responded with a strong no when asked if they follow the news on social media, they even try to avoid it. This was mainly because either they weren't interested in it, it didn't give an objective view or they did not want any negative news to decrease their mood.
We did not expect people to almost actively avoid news on social media.During the interview, it became clear that they did not actively watch the news. When asked what needed to change for them to actively watch the news, they responded that a lot had to change and that was basically impossible in their eyes. For them to watch the news actively, they had to trust it, which, as described above, is hard when you come from a generation where you're a critical thinker.
There might be a place between absolutely trusting the news and critical thinking that makes the youth want to actively watch the news but not trust everything they say. This will need more research to determine and is possibly an interesting topic for future research.
Conclusion of the research #
The youth are in fact influenced by social media. It starts it their development as a child and continues to have an impact on their behaviour as teenagers.
News on social media has an impact on the way they think about certain matters in life, politics for example. The subjectivity on social media makes them form an opinion in a non-fact based way. Luckily this is not always the case. We learned that most teens do try to fact-check the things they read and don't always believe everything that was published.
From the interviews that we conducted, we noticed a general trend in distrust in the news. Partly because of the news they report, but also because of the negative feeling they induce on the viewer's mood. Because of this very reason, many people reported that they avoid news sources, especially on social media.