As the amount of people using social media continues to increase; questions about how social media impacts activism continues to stay relevant. According to the Pew Research Center in 2018, around half of Americans have engaged in some form of political or social-minded activity on social media in the past year. With this number continuously rising, our society should take a closer look at some of the effects of social media, regarding activism in particular.

According to the same Pew Research Center study, about two-thirds of Americans think social media helps give a voice to underrepresented groups, but a larger share thinks that they distract people from more important issues. When taking a closer look at why this occurs, we can see that due to people’s natural open mindedness. Most people on social media are gravitated towards posts that are informative posts regarding an idea or event that isn’t heavily talked about or publicized, which allows for underrepresented groups to have their views shared and heard.

Furthermore, due to the current polarizing political climate, major media outlets reflect a similar scene. As events unfold, each major media outlet pushes their own narrative on the events which leads most viewers to feel completely disgusted with the other side's political interpretation. This sets the scene for the rise of independent media news outlets like the popular political show, Rising, on youtube with currently over 695,000 subscribers. This also encourages the use of social media as a political news outlet with younger generation’s being especially drawn to it.

However, the negative implications of social media on activism are rarely ever emphasized in the discussion. This perspective has saved us from any sense of introspection or self reflection, which ultimately can be very damaging for our future generations. The truth of the matter is that social media normalizes inactivity regarding the solution of the aforementioned issue and simply exacerbates the focus of the problem. As an issue becomes heavily posted about, it turns into a trend that is temporarily established on people’s stories or feed. This simply spreads information regarding the problem, typically sparked by an event; yet it doesn’t allow for the solution to be resolved. Social media also allows for people to quickly take the information found on social media as a fact and not actually do the research regarding the foregoing issue for themselves, which is unfortunately very toxic and harmful for our political discourse.

Similar to how everything has two sides to the story, so does this discussion. As social media allows for a faster way to spread information, it also serves as a faster way to spread disinformation as many of the “informational posts” have no links to their sources. While this isn’t the case for all posts, it is the unfortunate reality for many of the educational posts. On the flip side, social media does in fact amplify the voices of those that aren’t represented on a mainstream media platform.

While social media does offer some benefits to quickly spreading information that isn’t notable on other platforms, it does also have multiple negative implications regarding activism. Taking in information from multiple platforms can be extremely beneficial, but it's just as imperative to question the sources and reliability of the information you're receiving, particularly with social media.