You are a young child. You haven’t seen or experienced much of the actual world. Everything is in your pocket. That small piece of glass and metal contains all the information available to the public. Like any child would in this scenario you depend on this device for your view on the world. When you want to see how others live, you can. Children use social media more than some adults. Every kid wants to be a part of a community, to feel belonging to something. Every child wants to be heard. When someone uses social media they see a number behind every post and every opinion. They subliminally have a bias to support what is supported by the majority. Those who were born to be rebels and want to choose the less supported will automatically do that thanks to the likes and feedback on these posts. Say that there is two different political parties pushing two separate foundations or charities. The republican foundation has received a lot of backlash on the internet while the democratic one has received the opposite. A child who doesn’t have any of their own experiences to refer to about this matter is subconsciously forced to rely on feeling. Most children will feel that the one that is more popular and has more support is the better charity to support. Without social media people were forced to invest their time to do the research on their own. Before social media people still protested, students still rallied, change still occurred. Yet it was a different kind of protest, people had to go out on their own and learn about issues if they really cared about them. Now if you’re a young person living in America there is a sort of pressure to support something because everyone you see on social media supports some foundation or some movement. How could you expect a child not to rely on likes and comments when deciding what to believe. Most children want to be a part of the popular opinion, not the right one.

Social media undoubtedly creates an amazing platform for political and social issues to be publicized and for awareness to be brought. With these benefits also come great side effects. Social gratification for supporting widely liked organizations creates an unhealthy motivation for users to support certain issues. This mainly affects anyone who does not have a distinct world view that is based on personal experience, not necessarily only young children. This takes away their ability and most of all necessity to form their own opinion. Social media has done a lot of great things, it has also brought a lot of negative side effects with it, some may even outweigh the benefits. Because of this system, politicians gain young voters by proposing solutions to these popular issues. This seems good at first glance but the problem arises when you realize that most of these issues don’t actually impact the lives of the people that support them. Support for an issue on social media does not mean the same thing that support in real life meant back in the day. You can now have the time to quickly support an issue so far from ever affecting you because it takes a couple of clicks and maybe a minute of time. This “support” is still counted by politicians and they rely on what is popular to leverage their campaigns, in conclusion basing their campaigns on problems that the people of that area may not even have.

Article Written By: Freddy Gherardo | Assistant Editor