Social media is a challenge and an opportunity for press freedom

In a context of armed conflicts and a crisis of confidence in the media, the era of journalists creating content has begun and may be the future, says Ignacio de los Reyes.

Digital platforms for social media and content consumption have been both a headache for journalists and the exercise of press freedom. They have helped the spread of disinformation and compete with traditional and digital media for the attention of users who are increasingly less interested in reading news.

However, the same digital platforms can offer great opportunities to create newsworthy and useful content for audiences, especially in conflict contexts, such as those currently being experienced in the Gaza Strip or Ukraine, where journalists have overcome information barriers to make the stories of these places known.

“Social media is making it more difficult for there to be those black spots in the news that are usually associated with situations of conflict, war, and violence,” says Ignacio de los Reyes, a consultant in digital communication and innovation in content platforms, in an interview with Expansión.

This is important in such dangerous contexts as the Gaza Strip. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 97 journalists have been killed since the start of Israel's military operation against the Palestinian enclave on October 7. This is the deadliest period for journalists since 1992, when the organization began keeping records.

In Gaza, digital platforms are “an opportunity for many local journalists to have a distribution of content that we were not seeing in previous years,” says De Los Reyes, who has worked for companies such as Meta, Google and Snapchat.

Networks are not only important for journalists in the conflict zone to be able to report on what is happening, but also for journalists from other regions who have not been able to enter the Gaza Strip to be able to access the testimonies of the inhabitants of this territory, despite the context of the news blackout.

“An interesting example is Snapchat,” he says. “And you will see that in Gaza you have a huge amount of content posted by people who live there, who are being displaced, who are uploading practically in real time, not only the images they are witnessing, but also their own testimonies,” explains the specialist.

Disinformation, disinterest and distrust

Journalists are in a complex context. Although platforms can be used as an excellent distribution channel for news, they are also an excellent channel for propaganda and disinformation by actors interested in only having their version of events known.

Several major media outlets, such as the BBC and the New York Times, have their own fact-checking teams that are responsible for debunking information, but De los Reyes says this is a privilege that few sites have and that it is even more complicated for independent journalists.

"Where the line between what is real and what is not becomes blurred, it becomes much more difficult to verify," he says.

But that is not the only challenge. Audiences are increasingly less interested in consuming news content.

According to a study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, news consumers, especially women and young people, are increasingly looking for less content, at least from traditional media.