“Just Trust Me”-Snapchat

 

Corrected Version:

When reading through The New York Times technology section of news, an article about Snapchat jumped out at me. I decided to open it and read more because I am an active Snapchat user and happy with the advancements developers have made over the years, allowing it to be what it is today. Not only do I enjoy the light and fun social interaction aspect of snapchat, but I find the news and entertainment section, Snapchat’s Featured, very interesting. As someone who prefers seeking news and information from online sources over reading print newspapers and magazines, Snapchat’s Featured has made it easy and accessible for me everywhere with it being a mobile phone app. 

The article, “Snapchat’s Rules for Reader Trust” written by Quentin Hardy, was centered around Snapchat’s main fundamental; trust among users. The need for trust is present in every one of Snapchat’s many components. This was originally centered around the idea that when communicating with friends on Snapchat, everything sent and received was only available for a few seconds after being opened. According to Quentin Hardy, writer for “bits” section of The New York Times, “Friends could trust each other, confident that their communications would not be stored and mined for some unknown future use.” Now, with the news component of Snapchat, trust from users is even more crucial due to the rising problem of “fake news” in journalism. 

The article used Facebook and Yahoo as examples to discus the past issues of fake news being presented on social media and news sites. The article also discussed Snapchat’s Discover section and how past incidentes have been reported of misleading information. Although writers were simply trying to make their stories interesting or different from the same black and white news stories that are found across all news platforms daily, Snapchat administrators quickly put an end to this in order to preserve the trust that Snapchat as a business aims for. As far as Snapchat’s relationship with the people who were upset or misled while exploring Discover, this article is a great form of PR to hopefully redeem and instil that the trust is still there.   

Read the full article here.