Most Americans spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media every single day. Many of these hours are spent watching videos we mindlessly watch and scroll through, though many of them contain false information. News stories are something that almost everyone should be looking at; however, they should be from reliable sources like The New York Times, CNN, and even the Dial, which are better than social media and contain information that is true and has been fact-checked.
In June of 2023 when the Ocean Gate submarine was lost, the world was in question, leaving a perfect opportunity for social media to spread misinformation. A supposed recording of the screams from the people in their last moments was found and uploaded to social media. The video went viral, obtaining 4.9 million views in 10 days. However those were not their actual screams, it was a recording taken from the video game Five Nights at Freddy’s. Unfortunately, the truth was not spread as fast as the misinformation leading many people to believe something that was not real. This shows how easy it is for social media to manipulate people into believing something that is not true or something that is taken out of context.
Earlier this week I was sitting in peer advisory while Ms Pabst was discussing social media and giving a presentation. A topic that was brought up about social media was the amount of fake news on social media and to be aware of it. Many times videos can take things out of context and this could affect your life. If someone is jealous of you, they can edit a photo of you to have alcohol in it which could get you kicked out of your school and into big trouble. This is a smaller-scale form of false news but could be very destructive.
While social media videos are very unreliable they can also be a good way to get true information out. A lot of famous and reliable news sources post videos to social media to spread awareness of the topic to others yet social media still contains lots of false information and should not be used as a news source.
When you come across a video that is giving you information about politics or a world event, etc, instead of telling a friend first, see whether the information is true by checking reliable sources like The New York Times. If the video’s information is not true then reporting it will be a good step to stop the information from being spread to others.
