After a long day of school, junior Victoria Anderson was working on piles of homework in her bed after school when she received an alarming CNN alert stating republican influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot, and was later found dead.
Teens typically get their news on social media, with it being their main entertainment source. The primary issue students have found with finding news on social media is how truthful and unfiltered it is due as anyone is able to speak on any situation and falsify the information. The main problem is that very few fact-check it and then spread the information, causing dramatic, wrong, and sometimes even harmful information, which can cause confusion and conflict.
“I think there can be a lot of misleading propaganda and just incorrect information that can be exploited on social media,” Anderson said.
Junior Amerra Blake has watched the video unsolicited, while just trying to have fun at cheer practice with her friends, showing how much social media has affected students day-to-day life.
“I was at cheer and one of my friends… just showed me the video [of Charlie Kirk getting shot] and I did not want to see that,” said Blake.
Seeing these acts of violence at such a young age can be traumatic since teenagers’ brains aren’t fully developed yet. Since our brains get so used to seeing this graphic imagery, we become desensitized to our surroundings. Even with TikTok and Instagram having guidelines against certain things being shown, most videos that get reported don’t get taken down. A main reason that things like that happen is due to the massive amount of content circling around on the internet. With that, teenagers are seeing things most adults shouldn’t even be witnessing, like different acts of violence, without wanting to see them.
“I think a lot of scary information is exploited by youth, and I think it really ruins their trust…like seeing the video of the Ukrainian girl on the metro [getting stabbed],” Anderson said.
Senior Kaitlyn Hewing, has spoken on how teens need their news and the ignorance people have of the news.
“I know that people don’t really trust the news now because the news can be very skewed and they’re paid for by big corporations…but the news is still the news,” Hewing said.
A benefit of getting news from social media is how quickly it spreads. When people are genuinely interested in a certain topic, they willdig deeper, argue the point, or learn more about what happened. With all the resources available, it is easy to dig deep into the story to find out if it is true or not.
“[If I care deeply about something] I’ll look it up and research it more if I’ve heard something, so I know it’s true,” Blake said.
Finding out news, especially on social media, can have its ups and downs, but as teenagers, students need to look into the stories more and consider the source it is coming from.
“Sometimes it’s really hard to define what is biased just because our news is so filled with biases… so I would just say, go and get news from a whole bunch of different sources, not just limiting yourself to Fox News or CNN, but also look at Washington Post [or] CBS,” Anderson said.
