Personalized social media, geographies of trust and the news

This chapter examines the spatial impact of peer-produced information as trust in news shifts from newspapers to social media. As news media moves out of cities to save on real estate expenses, their coverage is impacted. In the United States, 82% of counties do not have daily local news coverage and are classified as news deserts. Communities that faced closure and consolation of local news often rely on information from lower quality peer-produced sources including blogs and social media. These outlets often foster gossip, rumor, and urban legends. Urban legends are peer-produced fables that are reappropriated to provoke emotion and offer a lesson to safeguard the reader. Many of these lessons foster xenophobia or invoke a hostile spatial imaginary about people and places. In geography, peer-produced content is often used to contribute large amounts of volunteered geographic information (VGI), which a variety of scientific findings rely on. Geography is still grappling with the implications of citizen scientists, and social media users willfully misinforming or producing dubious data. Furthermore, spatio-discursive practices privilege digital interactivities turning relational points of exchanges into metrics, including dubious data best illustrated in Amazon product ratings.