Every day, war continues in the Middle East. Cities are obliterated, homes reduced to rubble, and lives are being upended. Yet, the rest of the world only largely experiences this war through short bursts of sensational reels wedged between videos of cooking tutorials and cats dancing to pop music — we only really see what we are shown.
This is not because people are disinterested; rather, it’s the fault of consuming news through social media. According to Pew Research, 53% of American adults get news from social media in one way or another. This is quite alarming, as social media platforms have stringent policies that determine what information we consume.
Social media platforms claim neutrality, but the rules they set influence which wars the world notices and which ones it scrolls past. They claim to connect the world, yet the systems that decide what we see are built around engagement rather than
importance.
Algorithms rank posts based on how likely they are to generate likes, shares, and comments, not on whether they truly inform the public.
A study submitted in PNAS NEXUS shows that this engagement-driven system can amplify misinformation and extreme content while more complex realities struggle to break the noise. The horrors of war have just become another thing for us to scroll past.
In just two weeks, the war has resulted in staggering deaths in Iran and other neighbouring regions. What alarms me the most is the attack on a girls’ school in Iran, which killed more than 170 girls — despite our leaders’ guarantees that no innocents or civilians will be targeted. That attack was called multiple things. First, it was a resounding attack on an Iranian base, and later, it turned out to be a result of faulty intelligence.
Yet, many people barely remember hearing about it. Just because a story does not generate the same engagement as a celebrity controversy does not make it any less important than Timothee Chalamet denouncing ballet.
It is fair to say we have been desensitized: we experience so much information and
emotional overload from the boundless scrolls that the feed itself encourages forgetting. Within days, sometimes hours, the story sneaks beneath a new wave of
content.
This is also known as the half-life of social media content. Researchers at Scott Graffius found that engagement with posts is often less than a day. In practice, something as serious as a bombing or humanitarian crisis fades from people’s feeds in a matter of hours and even days.
Another example comes from the war between Palestine and Israel. An analysis done by BBC on Facebook data found that interaction with Palestinian news outlets on Facebook dropped by 77% after the first surge of attention following October
7, 2023, even though that was just the precursor to the destruction that ensued.
Conversely, it has been made abundantly clear that people do deeply care on social
media. Regardless of borders, people unite and respond with grief, outrage, and solidarity. But that is short-lived — algorithms reward novelty. It does not benefit it to show the same casualties, devoured cities, and the grieving mother who lost her
children in one swoop missile attack. This is the luxury of forgetting.
Once we recognize this, we should not abandon social media altogether. These platforms can expose injustice even for a sliver of time, but awareness requires the
ability to resist the logic of the feed.
We as students cannot control the wars that are unfolding across the world, but we can control where we get our news sources from.
Pick a reliable, consistent, and neutral news entity that you know and trust. Do some deeper research, too, beyond that one source of information. Fact-check yourself, be prepared to speak up, and fact-check other people, too, who have been exposed to misinformation.
Universities exist to create critical thinkers, not passive scrollers. If we learn to question what the algorithm shows us and engage in meaningful conversation on our campuses, we can push back against the quiet disappearance of human misery on our phones.
Be responsible enough to make the choice to remember instead of giving in to the luxury of forgetting.
