Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. I’m sure we’ve all heard of these words before, right? But what’s the one thing that comes to mind when you think about these platforms? For me, it’s connections. 

One day, I was scrolling through TikTok and didn’t think anything of it until I came across a post about an incident that occurred with a woman in Michigan. The TikTok talks about an event in which the woman returned to her car after leaving the grocery store only to find a woman creepily circling her car, preventing the woman from unloading her groceries into the vehicle. 

When most people think about these types of scenarios, they probably wonder how random they are, but surprisingly, it happens more often than you think. This scenario is known as human trafficking. 

For those who don’t know, human trafficking is often a scenario in which some type of force, fraud, or infliction is forced upon someone in order to get something in return. When I first came across the TikTok, it surprised me something so serious occurred in an area so close to my vicinity. 

Although it surprises me that events like these are more common than usual, it also makes me wonder how people get the news nowadays. When I go to look at the news, my first source isn’t usually CNN or Fox News; it’s usually social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. 

A story about an incident on Instagram will usually surface on one of my friend’s stories and will take hours before it reaches larger sources such as CNN. 

And what’s more ironic is that the social media posts themselves are usually more intrinsic in detail about the situation compared to the articles on CNN. But because not everything you see online can be ethical, it’s always important to check where your sources are coming from. 

According to Forbes, in the article titled “Fox News Sweeps July Cable News Ratings As All Networks See Declines,” Fox News has an average of over 700,000 viewers, 15% lower than the number of viewers they had from the year prior. 

Don’t get me wrong. Although it’s nice to be able to see what’s going on in the world from large news platforms such as Fox News, I think I speak for all of us when I say that word gets around faster on social media simply because of how popular these platforms are getting. 

Aside from being able to react, like, comment, and interact with my friends online, another advantage I have found with using social media is that I’ve also been able to learn more educational things as I spend my time online. 

What used to be dancing videos on my For You page quickly started to percolate with a plethora of videos ranging from ways to save money, news-related TiktToks, and even videos on how to improve your study habits; all things that are necessary yet not entertaining, which is what TikTok is mainly known for. 

Regardless of how you choose to define social media, I think that if we looked beyond the aspect of just being able to connect with people, we would better be able to understand the true power it holds by the power of sharing one social media post.