It’s safe to say that the world of social media is a place for people to escape their daily lives and to even have a good laugh from time to time. Going on TikTok and seeing videos of people making a fool out of themselves in public or even just going on Instagram and seeing a funny meme can put you in a whole different mood that you might not have been in before. But when it comes to political crises, when do these social media outlets become an inappropriate way to deal with one’s own personal beliefs? As people, we tend to joke about things that we may not understand or that may even scare us. However, joking about serious topics, political or not, is never the appropriate answer to describing how we feel.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2017, many turned to social media as an outlet to express the way they felt about the election. While it is our right as Americans to have freedom of speech, there is definitely a fine line between expressing oneself and trying to be disrespectful and even turn people against our country as a whole. Social media outlets are an amazing way to keep people informed about what is happening in society, but the negative side of this can be very extreme.
Another example of people using social media outlets to turn serious political events into a joke is the recent Iranian conflict. As soon as news outlets started to report about the conflicts arising between the U.S. and Iran, social media was the first place everyone looked to get the scoop, with our president even posting updates and announcements on Twitter. It wasn’t long after these announcements arose that memes, TikToks and Tweets were circulating with hashtags of World War III. Even topics as serious as war and a “potential draft” were being joked about, and hardly anyone was taking these events seriously.
What most people don’t take into consideration is that these topics hit home for many Americans that do not take them as a joke. Many people or their loved ones are involved in the military today and have to endure the consequences of political change. Most posts on social media carry little to no emotional intent and focus heavily on getting a reaction from viewers. However, when it comes to serious topics, especially political crises, a simple post could remind someone that their family member is being deployed or even leave the viewer with a feeling of unnecessary panic.
The main reason that joking and oversharing about topics of political conflict happen today is due to the fact that most of us are very uneducated about what is actually happening in the world. One person can see an event on the news or hear about it from one person, and then they automatically feel the need to share that information without knowing if what they heard was true. In this day and age, fact checking is not in demand. People always trust what they hear whether the information comes from a reliable source or not.
While social media can be used for very positive reasons, joking and sharing about political crises allows the positives to quickly turn into negatives. We live in a time where publicly sharing personal opinions and information is popular, but we could all do a better job at not taking this too far. Having a good laugh, especially during hard times, is always understandable. However, the line between joking and being disrespectful is very thin and should not be crossed.
