Information, news, and politics gathering through social media by Generation Z : A semi-structured interview study

Abstract: Social media is replacing many of traditional media’s purposes, information gathering is one of them. In the digital culture today we use our phones, the internet, and social media in our daily lives, especially younger generations, and those generations could be relying their information gathering on social media. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to get a better understanding of which role social media plays in the information, news, and political gathering of Generation Z. The aim is also to investigate how Generation Z views potential threats, personalization, and fact-checking on social media. Those questions were answered through a semi-structured interview with 10 interviewees from different parts of Sweden that were within Generation Z. Generation Z has a beginning of birth year starting at 1997 to 2012 and were chosen because that generation is the first generation to be born and grow up with access to portable digital technology and internet. The results through the thematic analysis made six themes which were social media use, experience of misinformation, source dependency, physical vs digital newspaper perceived trustworthiness, fact-checking preferences, and personalization. The interviewees indicated that social media is their main source of information, news, and politics, a few used traditional media now and then but mostly social media platforms. The perceived ability of the interviewees was that they knew the importance of following and gathering information, news, and politics through trustworthy sources on the platforms. If the interviewees were interested in a subject they saw a post about or if it was considered important they would fact-check it, otherwise not. The interviewees knew more or less that they had seen misinformation, they had experienced personalization and had different opinions about it.