Scrolling Instagram reels, Facebook, or TikTok at three in the morning usually leads me down a rabbit hole of atrocities.
A video came up on my feed that compared images of the Auschwitz concentration camp to a detention centre in the U.S. The only comment under the video chastised the creator of the reel, called it an invalid comparison, and said that the detention centres in America are good.
This isn’t anywhere close to half of the bullshit I come across on a daily basis, and nowhere near the most whack comment I’ve read.
It made me think, ‘Why are we so confident in being miseducated?’ When did it become so normalized to watch human rights violations and react so viciously without knowing the full context of things?
We shouldn’t be interacting with this type of content. News outlets, for the most part, try to be unbiased as per their principles and standards. A random account on Instagram getting involved in the conversations about the genocide occurring in Palestine, or the rise in racial discrimination across Canada, is biased. They don’t have any standards for their content. They can lie if they want, and they do.
I’ve never been the type of person who feels the need to comment on reels, but recently I’ve noticed that the people who do comment don’t even recognize the weight of their opinions. Why are we blaming victims of violence because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation? Why are we so misinformed on these topics? It doesn’t take much to understand the weight of our input, and the importance of educating ourselves.
I believe the over-exposure to these acts of violence through random sources, such as nameless accounts on Instagram, leads us to misunderstand the gravity of them due to a lack of context and information, in turn, creating a misinformed audience.
We need to expand our context and understanding of the violence and issues globally through legitimate news sources, rather than accounts such as YEGwave or Edmonton (the Instagram page). Get your news from trusted and reputable sources with reasonable standards and ethics. Trust local sources that are able to report on matters directly. Do some digging to see how your news sources verify their information.
Sure, it’s not as entertaining as doomscrolling social media and getting a mix of memes and genuine atrocities (how thrilling!), but it’s a better way to actually learn about issues, instead of polarizing yourself and rotting your perspective.
If you truly want to enrich yourself, read more books! Read cultural theorists, history, and political non-fiction that can help you understand big, world issues. I recommend Slavoj Žižek’s book Liberal Fascisms, which is a contemporary text that explores a range of political, economic, and social issues currently happening globally. Educating yourself with new information from books, in addition to daily news, is a positive way to move past the misinformation that social media has inflicted upon us.
Don’t let the algorithm force you into a spiral of misinformation. Problems cannot be solved when reality is distorted. Educate yourself!
