Secondhand opinions
Think before you speak
Photo by Ana Michel.
Tanya Shriram, Opinions Editor
Baja Blast. Iron Man. Carne asada tacos. The Metropolitan Museum of Art canceling John Galliano’s exhibit because of his racist and antisemitic remarks. That was my TikTok For You Page (FYP) in the total span of 30 seconds.
I scrolled past the first three videos, but the last one seemed interesting. So now I think Galliano’s a horrible person based on a five-second clip.
But hold on, I need to see what the comment section thinks too.
“If he [John Galliano] talked about Black ppl [people], no one would gaf [care].”
“Yet people still wear Chanel; she was a na-zi [Nazi] sympathizer also.”
“The [U]mmah stand with Galliano.”
And just like that, I had formed three brand-new opinions. Did I fact-check any of them? Nah. Did I do any research for myself? Nope. Did I accept whatever random people on social media told me? Pretty much.
It sounds absurd, but it’s quite common in our generation. People are so confident in having opinions on things they know almost nothing about. Social media has made information available at the touch of a button, resulting in opinions forming just as fast. Not through doing proper research or evaluating multiple perspectives, but through memes, influencers, and whatever’s trending that week.
People need to form their own opinions instead of letting social media do it for them.
The problem is not when social media introduces us to important issues. Arguably, that’s one of its best features. Social media connects people from every corner of the world and introduces us to topics we may have never been aware of otherwise. In fact, a survey across 19 countries found that 73% of people say social media makes them more informed about issues in their own countries as well as others. Seventy-seven percent of people also said that social media is an effective way to raise public awareness about sociopolitical issues.
But being introduced to an issue is not the same as actually understanding it. Everyone on social media is confident and persuasive; that’s the whole point. But it can also be extremely one-sided. To take TikTok as an example, TikTok claims its algorithm works off of seeing what you engage with, and then showing you more content like that while hiding content that it deems you to be less interested in. So, if a user interacts with videos showing only one side of an issue, their FYP will continue to reinforce that same perspective. And eventually, seeing just one side of an argument will make it seem like the only sensible one.
A 2026 study published in Nature applied this theory to US politics. Researchers created hundreds of controlled TikTok accounts during the 2024 presidential election, and they found that the more an account interacted with one political side, the more TikTok recommended content that aligned with that same side. In other words, what you do on TikTok gets fed right back to you.
But the algorithm is only a part of the problem. Social media also loves to take nuanced, significant issues and boil them down to what’s easiest for users to digest: memes. Personally, and I think I speak for most of our generation, I love memes. They’re funny, relatable, and exactly what social media is about. But memes should not be used as replacements for real information.
When serious political or social issues are reduced to a joke, it becomes incredibly easy to absorb the message without understanding the context or weight behind it. Even official accounts play into this, with the Democratic Party account posting memes “shipping” (supporting or imagining a specific relationship) Trump and Putin or the White House posting deportation edits. Memes are meant to make us feel something. But those feelings quickly turn into opinions formed from only a fraction of the whole story, making it even harder for our generation to actually understand the issues we are so quick to have an opinion on.
But that is exactly why memes are so popular. Fairly explaining a complex argument takes time, while a meme can tell you exactly who to like and who not to like in a matter of seconds. And while many people forget the details of a topic, a punchline is just easier to remember and easier to repeat.
And once an opinion becomes easy to repeat, actually understanding it becomes unnecessary. If a phrase gets repeated enough times, people suddenly feel confident in saying it themselves even if they don’t know half of what they’re saying. That’s exactly how trends work: people share and repeat ideas until they start to feel less like opinions and more like common knowledge. It’s like a member of the British Parliament shouting “No Taxation Without Representation” because someone put it on their Instagram story.
Yes, social media can be a great way to introduce us to issues from all over the world. But it should not be our only source of understanding them. Stop watching one video and acting like an expert. Open Google, look into the issue, read real reporting, or watch news briefs; just do something that genuinely informs you. Then take that opinion and tell whoever will listen, because if they call you out on it, at least you’ll know how to fight back.
Respectfully,
Tanya
