Thinking back to the day Edgar Maddison Welch burst into Comet Ping Pong is, for me, a reminder. It’s easy to cast judgment on someone who drives across state lines with an AR-15 to investigate a child-sex conspiracy at a pizza shop and say, “How foolish must you be to believe random tweets and Reddit threads over real evidence?”

You know — the third-person effect. But I never, until recently, understood why events like that, Jan. 6 and so many more seem to be normal occurrences in America.

Paulina Haux and Elisabet Lund showed us that social media features always come with a flip side. We connect online but feel lonelier, share our lives, but we feel watched, show our true selves but perform for likes and speak up to get silenced by algorithms.

Knowing these trade-offs helps us use social media without losing ourselves. But when the previous president convinced a group of angry, radicalized and isolated people that there was wrongdoing, people got shot and incarcerated, causing the state of democracy to be called into question.

Unfortunately, it seems that Twitter/X is becoming reality; radical or obscene texts that are currated or spread on the platform are having a greater consequence. Republicans show their base “radical left-wing” statements as a reality representing the entirety of the opposing party.

When Elon Musk, the face of the platform that 57 percent of users get their news from, according to the Pew Research Center, says a YouTuber should go to jail for “incitement to murder and domestic terrorism,” that influences people.

You see one person’s extreme opinion on the other side and apply it to everyone on that side, which causes more isolation.

Hillary Clinton did this first in 2016 when she said, “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables,’” adding, “Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”

An incredibly irresponsible thing to say as a politician at a time when many center-leaning and “normal” Americans were the ones you would want to win over the most. She herself contributes her loss partially to statements like that, which shows the real political turnout of this effect.

As a Journalism major with a niche for politics and social issues, “objectivity” is a funny word to me. It holds almost no meaning in the current state of American media.

The explosion of A.I. does not help its case either. How am I, as a voter, supposed to make strong-headed decisions about a candidate when each news source is partisan or biased in some way?

I imagine myself as a Fox News viewer after the Dominion lawsuit proved they spread disinformation about the 2020 election.

The echo chambers that the social media paradox creates for us make it impossible to vote as informed citizens when it feeds us information that it doesn’t .

And that’s not something I want.

The idea of a Democratic-Republic’s success relies on the idea that its voters are knowledgeable enough to eventually make the right calls and put the correct people into office.

We have become so isolated that the knowledge you think you have is always questionable by legitimacy before the polls even open. This is the failure of the Democratic system in the age of social media.

People with the belief that social media is a bastardized recreation of elitist culture argue that since it’s “worse” than the real stuff that no one cares and, therefore, there is no issue at hand here. They will claim that social media is the gun, and “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” That the gun is not important.

But I think we must ask, “Who gets to decide that this is always good and that is always bad?” What gives a billionaire more of a moral stake in this discussion than a Venezuelan immigrant who works two minimum wage jobs to support their family?

The answer to both these questions is that we have that social media has an impact, socially, politically and culturally. Everyone contributes, and the algorithms respond in ways that benefit you, specifically.

So, the next time you see cyberbullying on Instagram or swatting incidents on TikTok, remember to recognize that social media is reality; if we wish to improve well-being and public discourse in America, we should do our jobs in treating it as so.

Shon Eric Hernandez can be reached at [email protected], or followed on X @SHAnarchy000.