News & Information

How do most people in your country get their news? Increasingly through social media — Facebook and Zalo especially in Vietnam — though older generations still rely heavily on state television for the main evening update. Most people use both. The meaningful difference is quality control: broadcast news is curated by journalists with professional obligations, while social media surfaces whatever is being shared, with no editorial filter on what counts as credible. Why do you think false information spreads so easily online? A few mechanisms working together. Emotionally charged content — things that make people angry or outraged — gets shared more, because sharing is a social signal: people communicate something about themselves by what they share, not just pass information along. Platforms amplify that content because it drives engagement. And most people don't verify before sharing because the cost of being wrong feels low. The combination systematically selects for distorted information. Whose responsibility is it to check whether news is accurate? Everyone's, but with very different leverage. Platforms can affect millions of people with a single algorithmic change. Journalists bear responsibility for their own output. Individuals have a duty to be sceptical. Governments can set frameworks. The mistake is looking for a single responsible party — it requires action at multiple levels simultaneously, which is why it's so hard to address politically. Do you think people trust the media less than they used to? In most countries, yes, and for reasons that are partly justified and partly not. Mainstream media has made real errors — in the lead-up to major wars, in financial reporting before economic crises — that should rationally reduce trust. But the decline has gone further than those failures warrant, partly because distrust of media has been deliberately cultivated by political actors who benefit from an environment where nothing is considered reliable. How should young people learn to evaluate news sources? The most effective technique seems to be lateral reading — what professional fact-checkers do — where instead of reading a source deeply, you open other tabs to look for what others say about that source. It's far more effective than evaluating content in isolation. Schools could teach it directly, but it requires a shift from "here are the trustworthy sources" toward "here is how to evaluate any source," which is harder to standardise.