On Sept. 10, I stepped out of my Physics lab for a half-brain, half-bathroom break and opened Reddit to see two-minute-old video footage of conservative pundit Charlie Kirk being shot in the throat. Forty minutes later, freshly out of my lab and chatting with friends about the shocking news, I learned of his death from Yik Yak.
People today learn the latest news within minutes of its inception. News found on social media has been distilled into its most essential parts and is released with lightning speed. While not the sole means by which we learn our news, social media has increasingly become our primary source. According to a Pew Research Center study released in September 2025 regarding American adults’ news diets, “53 percent say they at least sometimes get news from social media.” For younger Americans, those numbers increase. From another study released on the same date, we can find that 76 percent of people aged 18–29 claim to use social media sites for news at least sometimes, compared to 62 percent of those aged 30–49 and 28 percent of those aged 65+ stating the same.
Recently, I’ve reflected on my status as part of the majority of young Americans who receive their news online, repeating the things I learned on Instagram to my friends as a subject for conversation. Compared to traditional media, the standards for the quality of information put out on the internet are far lower. A random Twitter user is not subject to the same fact checking that a New York Times writer is, and because of this, misinformation can spread like wildfire. Recommendation algorithms designed only to get more clicks often push wrong, but eye-catching, information. Some sites in the past have attempted to combat this, implementing fact-checking systems into their algorithms, but these have largely fallen out of favor. For example, Meta, headed by Mark Zuckerberg, disbanded its fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram this past January, a system put in place following increasing scrutiny on the site over its contribution to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Zuckerberg lambasted the system as overcorrective and anti-free speech on the Joe Rogan Experience, perhaps reflecting his public heel turn designed to suck up to the second Trump administration. In addition to this, the barrier to entry for sharing news on these sites is near zero; anyone or anything with an internet connection can post to Twitter or Instagram, with bot-fueled posting running increasingly rampant following the advent of generative AI. Even when the information posted is true, it rarely contains the full story. The danger of these half-truths is that they can easily leave the reader satisfied in their knowledge, content with the information contained in the 15 seconds of the minute-long TikTok they watched and the three odd comments they’ve read. In essence, news found on social media can hardly be called trustworthy.
That’s not to say that traditional media is free of its problems. In a research paper published in the Journal of Science Communications regarding the use of scientific studies in the news, authors Georgia Dempster, Georgina Sutherland, and Louise Keogh discuss the misuse of real studies to create sensationalist, eye-catching stories. They discuss how news media uses eye-catching buzzwords such as “landmark discovery” and “historic breakthrough,” which “obfuscate objective reporting by highlighting and downplaying certain elements of stories in media,” impacting the readers’ understanding. This manipulation of truth is not without reason; in the advent of the internet age, traditional news has been struggling. Local papers are dropping like flies, and ad rates continue to crash. To combat this, journalists are “under increasing pressure to generate ‘click bait’… result[ing] in inaccuracies and sensationalist stories being published.” Traditional media also faces another challenge: corporate backing. With Jeff Bezos owning The Washington Post and the Murdachs creating a media empire focused on propagating conservative beliefs, the traditional news that we do consume is often backed by political forces with ulterior motives.
Still, behind the issues of sensationalist stories, fiscal challenges, and corrupt backing, there is a community of journalists working in traditional media dedicated to speaking the truth. Reading an article will still give a more complete understanding of its subject to its reader when compared to short-form content found on the internet. Social media has its strengths, too. Its speed is unmatched; with a network of billions using these sites, acting as their own mini-journalist documenting their daily lives, there is essentially no limit to the amount of coverage found on them. Social media excels when spreading breaking news of undeniable truth: Charlie Kirk was shot on Sept. 10, and at this point, it is a near impossibility to close Pandora’s Box. Phones and social media are significant to many parts of people’s lives, including my own. With the amount of time spent on them, it’s practically certain that we will reach the news first on Instagram or one of its sister sites. For me, the solution becomes clear: We must turn to collaboration between new and old media. Social media can give us that first lead, hook us into a topic with introductory knowledge, but that must be taken in tandem with an intentional search for context. We cannot exclude important news from our algorithms, but we can change our behavior upon our encounter with it. So I ask all of us, but mainly myself, to become unsatisfied with the tidbits that we read and watch on our phones, to treat them as mainly an appetizer to the meal. While wider legislative change is certainly needed in a national battle against misinformation, our individual choice to become more deliberate in our interactions with the outside world is key to creating a more informed society.
