We see that social media is the biggest source of big data. Even experts believe social media data makes the big data. This is because social data is readily available to the researchers and can easily be used for research and other purposes.

This social data has a lot of details, features, geographical aspects and what not. On the other hand, news or media data is not accessible by the people the way social media data is. So experts believe we should move from social media data to news as the big data source. But how it will be possible is discussed below.

Why social media data is widely used is because it gives access to every person. Furthermore, the social media data is machine-friendly when it comes to its distribution. This data is compatible with many tools and the workflow never stops. Researchers find it really easy to get started with the social media data.



On the contrary, this social media data is really biased and this is because of the huge and top brands operating through social sites. Moreover, the data shows only a small portion of human society. You can’t draw findings or reach a conclusion with data acquired through social media platforms.

Twitter is the most popular social sites still it captures a small portion of the data. What makes social media data so popular is it fulfils the needs of big data because of its massive size, immense volume and other attributes.

On the other side, the journalism or news data is small but very accurate and rich in information. Let me clear this with an example. From 1945 to 2005, the New York Times published almost 6 million articles with a total word count of 2.5 billion. In contrast, one-day data on Twitter is more than 50 years of work done by NYT. This is because so many people retweet the same thing. So the social media data is huge in size but less rich whereas the journalism data is really rich and shows more accurate information.

The data size is also worth discussing. The social media data either from Facebook or Twitter is huge whereas that coming from news and journalism is small. But both are very different when it comes to their effectiveness and potential. When millions of people share or retweet the same thing, word count increase that leads to more size of the data.

Apart from this, there are all types of content and data like text as well as visual content and images on social sites. The news data mostly consist of words. But this is more expressive, meaningful, rich in information and relevant. It is not as biased as that of the data from social media platforms.

Today, our issue is we have access to the big data but the source is not just reliable. You can’t make research from the big data coming from social media sites. They have videos, infographics, images as well as text. But the news or media content is based more on text, less in the visual content. Managing such a huge amount of social media data is also a problem. You can manage a small chunk of it but the information is repetitive and doesn’t offer the correct details and information.

Most of the researchers focus on social media and digital media because they think the journalism data is just small and they have not thought about it the way they should have. Another factor that needs our attention is the big companies behind social media data. Most of the content on social media sites is paid or is done by the publishers when they are paid. It lacks the research work and is more like an artificial.

The experts believe the data, whether about business backup, employee monitoring or any other field, should be obtained from the new data. We should move from the social media data and our source should merely be the news and journalism origin. This offers us better information, more accurate facts and details. With fewer data in size, we can extract more information, meaningful results and interpret in exactly the correct ways.