Reliability of social media in reaching news

Media and technology have evolved together throughout the history of mankind. Historically, news has evolved from an early oral stage to the industrial era of radical innovation. With innovation of telegraph and printing press, news entered into a new phase in terms of content and form. With the emergence of Internet at the stage, news is transforming once more in the domain of social media. With the help of technological development especially internet technology, social media have become a public sphere for ordinary people to produce and consume news, yet there are some negative implications such as fake news. Therefore, the reliability of social media becomes a hot topic of media studies and this needs to be analyzed. This study was conducted on social media users in order to analyze the reliability of news and to test 10 hypotheses. In the study, a questionnaire was formed with 22 items that were contained 7 demographics and 15 questions related to social media news and conducted among 435 social media users. Data collected from the survey with the contribution of SPSS program was interpreted by Mann Whitney U Test, Kruskal Wallis Test and Spearman correlation. Data from the research reveal that the reasons to use social media as to prefer it for different views and comments, to reach alternative news, to prefer news and persons that are closer to users` own view increase the reliability of news accordingly.