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I spent the majority of 2020 rotting in bed continuously jumping back and forth between the same few social media apps. Most of my knowledge about what was happening in the world was limited to Buzzfeed headlines and PopCrave’s X, formerly known as Twitter, feed.

It was a monumental year in terms of politics, popular culture, and activism. With all the commotion, I wanted to be more concerned with what was happening around the world, so I did what I thought was best: I resorted to social media and let my TikTok For You Page become my primary news source.

It’s no secret that social media has the ability to spread information broadly in a very short period of time. So, with just a few scrolls and in a matter of minutes, I could listen to influencers, celebrities and even my own peers dissect the 2020 presidential election, explain the origin COVID-19 and how the vaccine worked or discuss the nuances of climate change.

I never thought what I was consuming on social media was false. While I knew that some things may be exaggerated, straight up misinformation was not on my mind. I mean, who wasn’t fact checking?

The little I learned from reliable sources about what was going on in the world could be attributed to Apple News articles sent by my mother or a CNN news special my dad had playing in the background while I practiced the “Renegade” dance. So, most of it went in one ear and out the other.

I was very ignorant about the news for most of my life, so finally feeling knowledgeable and informed from what I was seeing on social media was amazing. I felt like my mother, sending TikTok and Instagram posts to my friends and siblings, asking them questions like “Did you know that 80 percent of the world has been impacted by climate change?” or watching videos claiming to have exposed where COVID-19 really came from.

While I was often ignored or sent the occasional “thumbs-up” reaction out of pity after sending no less than 10 videos in a row about the underlying presidential election conspiracies, my sister said something I’d never heard before.

“You know this is fake news, right?”

Fake news describes news stories that are untrue, offer false or misleading information to push certain ideologies or opinions and provide little reputable sources or facts.

Those who have taken SU’s COM 107 course are probably aware of the term and what it entails, but up until three years ago, it was foreign to me, merely a buzzword I heard politicians rant about on X. I mean, I had no reason to not believe my favorite Instagram pages and TikTok influencers.

Cindy Zhang | Digital Design Director

You could say I was pretty ignorant for way too long, and up until recently, I blamed my faults on being a young high school student who could afford to be uneducated. But as a “real” adult who could vote and needed to make informed decisions, I decided to switch and started reading the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

I made the mistake of assuming that everyone reaching college age did the same thing as me. I was somewhat surprised as a freshman when no one in my class could name the nine Supreme Court justices. I told myself, “We’re still in that transition period, I’ll give them a few months,” but even this year one of my classes went quiet when a professor asked us to list news headlines from the previous week.

I was shocked when I realized that people weren’t out of that ignorance period, but I realized it’s not their fault.

Our generation and the generation after us is simply a product of the digital age. For most of our lives, we’ve learned from social media or television, only turning to news from print or books when they were required for school.

There aren’t a lot of influencers telling us how to fact check information. It’s very easy to get looped into using our social media apps as our primary news sources, as everything is on our screens now, even reputable sources.

You don’t have to pick up a book or print if you don’t want to, the real sources are just as readily available as the news that comes from our feeds. So while it might seem easier to base our information strictly from what we see on social media, looking to trusted websites and publications will prepare us to participate more effectively in society.

Social media allows us to be exposed to so many topics, but it shouldn’t serve as our main source of news. We should question information often, and engage in behavior that’ll aid our evolution into people who can make informed, intelligent decisions.

Kaitlyn Paige is a junior studying Public Relations. Her column appears bi-weekly, and she can be reached at kipaige@syr.edu.

Published on September 10, 2023 at 11:53 pm