Like many of my friends, I first learned about Charlie Kirk’s passing online. I had gone onto Snapchat and was going through my friends’ stories when I saw one that said “RIP Charlie Kirk” with a memorial picture of Kirk in the background. Shocked, I went on to the next person’s story. This story was a direct contrast to the one before it, a stock photo of a happy person with the caption “He’s dead!!”
If you ask high schoolers what their main source of news is, most won’t say a newspaper or TV program. Instead, they’ll likely answer TikTok. According to the World Press Institute, as of May 2022, 51 percent of teens aged 14-18 received their news through social media. While this may seem like a harmless and quick way for teenagers to stay in touch with what’s going on around them, social media is built on engagement and opinion, not accuracy. Because these apps prioritize views and likes, misinformation spreads quickly, blurring the lines between truth and fiction.
I found out about Kirk’s death, not at school or in a newspaper, but from whoever posted about it first. Going onto TikTok, I saw numerous videos with the same message as my friends’ Snapchat posts, some celebrating and others mourning. Social media’s engagement-driven algorithms are set up to only show you opinions they know you will agree with, trapping users in an “echo chamber” of posts and people who agree with them politically. Furthermore, research published in the Oxford Academic Journal suggests that social media shows more far-leaning, polarizing posts than those that show a middle ground because these posts receive more extreme reactions. This limits the perspective that different news sources would give and causes a dangerous rift between people.
What makes these platforms even more polarizing is how they tend to blur the line between opinion and news. This stops students from coming up with their own viewpoints, which traditional media allows. Because of this, getting your news from social media will often just drag you further into political extremes, which has led to many of the cultural issues and divisions in our country today, such as medical conspiracy theories and accusations of voter fraud. Social media itself is a sea of extreme views and misinformation, which are easily spread and manipulated.
I’ve noticed the consequences of this beyond social media, and in the high school’s classrooms. Instead of having genuine discussions, students will parrot what they hear online, confident in their opinion because an uninformed influencer agrees with them.
While I am also guilty of getting the majority of my news online and through friends, I’ve learned through my experiences that what you see on your For You Page is not always the truth. To be informed and not just entertained, we as students should start to question what we see online and not blindly follow trending opinions or influencers. As a BHS community and across the world, we all need to realize that understanding doesn’t come from watching a few 30 second videos. We need to dig deeper into our own opinions and allow ourselves to be curious about perspectives that we may not initially agree with.
Because of the rampant misinformation and addictive algorithms of social media, next time I hear about shocking news, I’ll look deeper than my own feed and at trustworthy news sources instead. In a world where anybody can have a platform or opinion, it is up to us as individuals and students to discover our own personal truths and beliefs beyond our phones.
