While mindlessly scrolling on Instagram, it’s not strange for one to stumble upon news on current humanitarian crises, environmental catastrophes, and the political atmosphere in America. Just being on social media for a few minutes can cause a slippery slope of thoughts, leading to both stress and panic.

This is not new information. The nature of social media is to gain more clicks, so news channels will flood the front page with intensely negative content, dramatizing information to bring fear and curiosity. This is detrimental to everyone — especially teens and young adults, who often get their news from social media.

According to a 2021 study by Juwom Hwang with the American Psychological Association, while all types of news consumption increased anxiousness, overwhelmedness, and fear for the future, television and social media increased it the most.

However, beyond simply creating stress and worry, social media is also inducing guilt.

Many content creators will guilt the individual to like, share, comment, and donate on every single call-to-action video that comes up. While these are not difficult demands to meet, once someone interacts with one post, similar videos will start appearing due to the way social media algorithms work. Eventually, after seeing so much suffering, it may lead to emotional exhaustion.

Of course, while some don’t care about current issues, it is also a possibility that others have emotionally detached themselves as a coping mechanism. Many factors play into this detachment. Mainly, it feels impossible for one person alone to make a meaningful difference, especially for younger people like high school students who are experiencing one of the most stressful times in their adolescent lives. For instance, in humanitarian crises, the situation is often complex and buried under decades of systemic issues, which makes those of us watching from a screen feel overwhelmed and helpless. It becomes easier to detach than dealing with the guilt of being unable to do anything tangible.

This is not to say teens who have emotionally detached themselves stop caring about the issue, but rather, it becomes quickly forgotten by scrolling onto the next video. These call-to-action posts become another form of quick content on social media, and do not bring as strong of an emotional impact on the viewer and requests for support, but instead have the opposite effect: desensitizing them.

However, problems do not go away by ignoring them or scrolling past them. When we assume that we are powerless or that problems do not affect us, we become complacent in systemic issues.

This is especially concerning when considering how crucial students have historically been in activism. Think about the student sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement, the student protests during the Vietnam War, and more recently, college students protesting for a ceasefire in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Obviously, there are still many limitations on what we can do in global and political issues, but one big step would be self-awareness. Take a break off social media if it becomes overwhelming, but do not ignore all current events. Although these are simply issues on a screen, they can affect our current lives in ways we could have never imagined.