Has social media muffled human struggle?

One minute, you’re watching a video of a duck eating different types of ice, and then scroll to see the next video showing the victims of another school shooting. As we rapidly switch from one emotion to another while scrolling through overstimulating and vastly unpredictable social media apps, our minds aren’t able to ever fully grasp or differentiate what we see on social media as entertainment versus reality. The more we casually see depictions of violence and learn about human crises through casual and mindless scrolls online, the less we are shocked by them and the less we feel compelled to do anything about them.

Performative activism has, and continues to be, an issue when it comes to social justice. When social media activism was at its peak during the summer of 2020, we saw a flood of Instagram stories often featuring violent videos of abuse, including police brutality, animal abuse, etc. Although it is important to raise awareness about these issues, the vast majority of the people who were both sharing and consuming content about humanity’s issues weren’t, and still aren’t, actively try to change these situations beyond the bare minimum efforts of just raising awareness. While this is better than staying silent, our rampant and reckless “activism” online is highlighting issues at the cost of our mental well-being and true activism.

Social media activism is paradoxical. On one hand, there lie benefits in the accessibility of sharing valuable and important information about the many ignored and tragic issues in our world. If one individual shares something on their story, it can reach up to hundreds of more people, meaning usually at least a few people will see it and learn about it for the first time through just those few clicks. However, the utter simplicity of reposting leads to issues in and of itself. 

Many people who fall back to social media activism don’t think or research before reposting what they think looks informational or important. This often has led to misinformation being spread through persuasive and seemingly credible posts. Even when the information is accurate, issues arise when people use reposting information as an excuse to not make any other efforts towards these causes. Although the intentions behind social media reposting aren’t necessarily that important if furthering information, if most people use it as an end-all be-all, reposting becomes counterproductive. 

Beyond these, a side effect of social media activism that we often don’t think about is that the simplicity of reposting these graphics and stories leads to our desensitization to the issues being presented. The more that we see a cause on social media, the more we end up disregarding it and ignoring the whole thing as a result.

Through excessive exposure to problem after problem during leisurely scrolls, we forget that these posts are inspired by real people’s suffering and that many people and organizations actually do need our help. Although social media activism has its upsides through sheer accessibility and reach, it often becomes meaningless, with potential to even be harmful, to our motivation to take action against, or even understand, the problems in our world. Overexposure to constant negativity in the news can also lead to constant feelings of helplessness that do more harm to our mental health than good. 

When we see different issues being presented to us in the same manner, we subconsciously register all of them as relatively the same. Therefore, we would register a post about the dangers of Elon Musk buying Twitter and Kanye’s antisemetic remarks about the same as a post about the latest TikTok scandal between influencers: another social issue to think about. Although many of us care about what is being presented to us, we find it harder to distinguish between levels of importance when it is all shown in the same context and format. 

To be able to see people dying, assaulted and hurt through other forms of violence so casually and often isn’t healthy. On top of that, when we become desensitized to seeing this brutality, we start disassociating these representations with the actuality of these events. Seeing this violence on social media allows us to distance ourselves from these realities, and allows us to ease our moral responsibility to help by simply reposting the graphics for more people to see and do the same things. This easy way out that has become so commonplace has led to the artificial distance between what we see on social media and what we know is reality. Although we might see social media activism as a better than nothing tool for justice, we must ask ourselves: Is resharing going to make a positive impact on the world, or is it simply an excuse for our lack of other action?