In the decades since the first social media platform, Six Degrees, was launched in 1997, digital platforms have come to be an integral part of the daily lives of billions of people around the world. According to “Our World in Data,” out of the entire world’s population, 61.4 percent use social media and of internet users around the world, 94.2 percent are on social media. Moreover, the 2023 State of the Academy found that the average Andover student spends 2.46 hours on social media each day and 77.6 percent of students get their news from social media. Social media platforms, created to enable people to share, create, and exchange content with each other, are host to incredible amounts of digital information, whether it be stories, photos, or short reels that range across almost every genre and cater to more audiences than you can count.
As you scroll or browse any of these social media platforms, they oftentimes utilize algorithms to “personalize” your feed, tracking your interactions, whether it be your comments, likes, or shares, sometimes even how long you spend on each post, in order to recommend you content that is similar to what it thinks you typically “enjoy.” These algorithms, while designed to help draw you into your time on social media, also give way to the danger of epistemic bubbles or echo chambers, environments that lack the ability for users to encounter beliefs and opinions that differ from their own and expose them to a diverse range of ideas.
In the case of Instagram, the dominant social media platform which 92.3 percent of the Andover student body uses, Instagram Reels comments in particular have the possibility of becoming a breeding ground for toxicity — lack of censorship and the normalization of derogatory jokes can lead to harmful rhetoric that isn’t always understood as humor. Especially with powerful algorithms set in place, extensive use of any social media, including Instagram, puts us at risk of unknowingly viewing a feed that only reinforces the negativity that already exists in it. At first, it’s just one reel with a comment section full of hateful jokes that are presumably humorous – maybe we laugh, maybe we don’t. But what doesn’t escape us is the tens of thousands of likes garnered on each of these comments, the abundance of replies under each of them of people laughing along, the likes our friends left on the same post. The next time we come across a reel of the same nature, maybe we find it a bit more funny than before. Surely, if the astronomical number of likes is anything to go by, everyone knows these comments are only jokes and not actually targeting the creator in any way. Maybe we’ll even leave a like of our own since it’s all in good humor anyway. No biggie. And then before we know it, these posts with their potentially harmful comment sections become a dime in a dozen, a typical part of our feed that we share a good laugh at and then move on from.
Convinced by the seemingly universal participation of other users in making and supporting these jokes – an effect of the positive feedback loop constructed by any social media algorithm – we become astoundingly desensitized to hateful language that we would otherwise be appalled by in a real-life conversation. Ironically, the virtual bubble that allows us to connect instantly with millions of other people across the world also simultaneously fuels a disconnect from reality and other people’s emotions that causes us to turn a blind eye to problematic conduct just because it is online. Sheltered behind a screen, a keyboard, and the relative anonymity it offers us, we feel separate enough from the people we see on Instagram Reels to be able to stand by, and sometimes join in, as potentially hurtful words overwhelm certain posts’ comment sections, since the creator won’t take them seriously anyway. But therein lies the fault in all this logic: social media is inherently vulnerable to misinterpretation, and the normalization of derogatory language in these comment sections only further blurs the line between a harmless joke and an actual violation of basic respect towards others.
None of this is to say that Instagram Reels is inherently problematic, or that we cannot enjoy the content we see on social media – after all, we all know that feeds are meant to show us posts that will elicit some kind of (hopefully) positive emotional response from us, and social media itself is meant for us to connect and share content with each other. But with this knowledge also comes the responsibility to reflect upon the ways in which we interact and internalize the negativity we will inevitably come across, for if we are not careful, we can quickly become complacent in the dehumanization of others through “harmless” jokes that do more damage than we think. The acknowledgement and awareness of such dangers is itself the first step.
