Michael Romero ’28
Loyola Student
I use social media as a tool, but I understand it is important to be cautious when using this type of tool. The problem with social media is that it can get you deep into an echo chamber. It is designed to make money off of you by keeping you engaged. That means repeating the same political beliefs, religious beliefs, or just certain things that you like, no matter how inflammatory they are or how ignorant they could be, if this content keeps your attention, then the algorithm is going to push it towards you.
Social media is good in a way that allows you to connect and learn more information, but that information comes at the cost of maybe being untrustworthy. You have to treat everything with skepticism because you don’t know the ulterior motives of people posting online. Ultimately, it’s still a bunch of random people online.
Social media tends to inflame certain political actions, and we see this all the time — especially with Donald Trump on Truth Social, where he posted an image of himself as Jesus healing people, as he’s bombing people in Iran.
Social media rewards attention a lot. Extreme posts often spread faster than careful ones. This can create spaces where racist jokes, sexist jokes, harassment, threats, victim blaming, or just anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-trans, anti-Mexican ideas become normalized, because it assimilates you around a group of people who do not contest your ideas but reinforce them.
And when you have all this information sharing at one time, and you’re not willing to let yourself be open to learning, you start to shelter yourself from other people.
We saw this with QAnon, when they were meeting people of similar social standings, they were kind of shutouts, and they started blaming minority groups for their ills. They believed this because they shared a collective, wrong understanding, but because it was collectivized in their mind, it became true.
When many people repeat those ideas, violence against minorities or women can feel acceptable or tolerable.
Loyola students have seen this in their own lives with Agartha accounts that paint the Aryan race as the most supremacist, and they were the only ones getting into heaven in this weird, fantastical society, where minorities were placed at a lower level. This inflammatory language can get spread around so easily because it’s just all around you. Because you see it all the time, to your mind it becomes true, even if it’s not.
In my experience, I have seen such inflammatory language through an account associated with Loyola but was not affiliated with Loyola: Cubs With Ice. One of the account’s posts pushed a particular conservative political stance. In a post, I saw a student at Loyola comment on the Cubs With Ice post saying that he 100% supports the account, and that the illegal aliens invading the United States pose a threat and they should all be deported, as it would be better for the country.
That comment was later deleted after a Loyola student who graduated last year sent a reply. The former student basically told him off for his comment and called out that the student was speaking from a position of privilege. I believe the student originally felt comfortable posting his comment because he thought he was in a safe space among fellow conservatives on the Cubs With Ice account. He deleted that comment the moment that someone outside of his circle noticed his rhetoric and took action against it.
However, political disagreement often doesn’t just end on social media platforms; it spills over into people’s personal lives.
Thankfully, on campus, I have not witnessed any forms of physical violence as a result of political disagreement. The problem is that I have witnessed some forms of discrimination and unintended violence from people who do not fully understand the context surrounding certain structural challenges.
In one of my classes, we were discussing certain racial factors that play a role in creating structural disadvantages for minority groups. The discussion was centered on environmental injustice, specifically how black and brown people are particularly vulnerable to environmental pollution and the effects of climate change. Since these groups are more likely to be born into lower-income, urban neighborhoods, they often experience greater exposure to environmental harms in their lifetime than a white person living in a suburban neighborhood.
In this class, my teacher showed a video detailing how this inequality manifested and how we as Cubs ought to respond, not only from a political standpoint but also from a Catholic standpoint.
After watching the video, my teacher took a moment to talk about how he disagreed with the video and invited other students to explain why they also disagreed with it.
My teacher argued that the video was misleading and potentially misrepresenting the situation because poor white people also exist.
Even though class may play a role in environmental injustices, race also has a significant impact. I know from my personal experiences that race plays a huge part in environmental vulnerability because there are historic racial ties in how neighborhoods are built.
The disconnect between my understanding and my teacher’s understanding stems from the fact that we are working off different information bases. A large part of this is due to people being politicized differently by our social media algorithms.
Social media encourages political commentators to ignore empirical evidence and instead prioritize gotcha moments online. No matter how little evidence these commentators have, as long as it sounds catchy, it’ll become embedded in people’s minds.
Regardless of the evidence that African American people are placed at a significant disadvantage when it comes to housing and environmental health, it was very possible that my teacher believed the opposite, purely because of something he had seen on social media or was told by other conservative friends online.
Social media creates the kind of sheltering that leads to the kinds of disconnected explanations I have witnessed, simply because people are often struck by an inflammatory post.
Ultimately, social media’s impact on politics has been disproportionately negative, producing more radicalized content and polarization between people than genuine, thoughtful dialogue.
Eli Ess
Mathematics Teacher
When I use social media, I primarily go on Instagram and sometimes doom scroll. I occasionally check my YouTube feed for content I’ve subscribed to, and look up videos to watch every now and then. I don’t really use Facebook anymore. I definitely don’t use TikTok.
When I think about my students using social media, I believe they use it similarly to me. I’m sure that they subscribe to creators on YouTube, and I’m sure that they have a feed on Instagram. Something that my students do that I do not is use social media as a messaging platform. I’ve seen my students use it as their primary way to communicate with others.
I primarily see social media as a distraction in a learning environment such as my classroom.
It’s very rare that students will bring ideas or concepts from YouTube or Instagram beneficially into the classroom. Instead, students use platforms to help them out with their homework or studying. Generally, I still do see social media as a hindrance. For example, students are being distracted from their work that they are supposed to be doing at home.
I have seen it before. Students will screen-share or use it as a messaging platform to copy answers from each other.
Social media has a tremendous impact on my teaching. Anytime a student is using somebody else’s work and pretending that it’s theirs, I think it has a huge impact on their learning, their understanding of material.
I definitely have seen an impact outside of the teaching environment. Many people, especially students and the youth, use social media as their only source of information, and then they’re starting to get into things where the algorithm shapes what they see.
They begin using social media as an exclusive source of news, where they’re not getting any other credible sources. That really shapes what somebody’s opinions look like; when they see their TikTok feed as fact, their perception of reality becomes warped.
As a result, they have a very flawed view of what reality is. They are less and less likely to be able to come up with their own conclusions and think for themselves.
Loyola students should at least ask themselves: Why is this person putting this information out there? Are they doing it only because it benefits other people, or does it directly benefit them? Is there some kind of monetary reason why they might be doing these things?
There are a lot of bad actors on the internet that are doing this for influence, power and money. People need to realize these kinds of things when they decide to watch somebody’s video or pay attention to somebody’s post instead of allowing themselves to be uncritically influenced.
Kamran Patel ’27
Loyola Student
I mainly use social media for my own leisure, but I also use it a lot for robotics because there is a good community on social media around robotics, both on Instagram and YouTube. I use these social media platforms a lot to base some of the ideas I create for the team.
After the LA Regional competition, our robot just sucked — it was bad how much we were underperforming. We did get picked to go into the playoffs, but we were the first team to lose. We were just performing horribly. In the two-week phase between our next competition, we really needed some sort of change to the robot.
During that time, I was supposed to be looking at the intake of the robot. The intake is essentially picking up the in-game object, which was fuel, and putting it into the robot’s hopper. Then we’d shoot that into a hub. At that time, I had close to no CAD experience at the time and barely knew how to design stuff.
So I went to YouTube and started searching for some of the top teams’ robots. I believe some of them were Code Orange, 3476 and some other teams like 1678. That’s where I found they had this very specific part on the bottom so that the fuel would get kicked up and launched into the hopper. And I was like, “Why don’t we have that?”
Following that, I just drew out what they were doing on a piece of paper. I even went to the library and used one of those whiteboards and drew a diagram of what we could do.
Then, at the actual regional event, there was a massive jump in our performance. At the LA Regional, the previous competition, I believe we placed 22nd out of 42. In Orange County, we placed in the top 10. We also won the Quality Award in Orange County, which is essentially an award for the bot that is the ideal model for other teams in the competition.
I honestly wouldn’t have been able to pitch that change to the team if it wasn’t for me just looking at a YouTube video or Instagram and searching up what some of these other good teams had done. Social media allowed me to basically compare notes.
There are definitely a lot of people who have benefited from social media, specifically certain creators that I enjoy. A good example is Michael Reeves. He does a lot of engineering stuff and it really does seem that he found his community through social media. He hangs out a lot with other engineering creators like OfflineTV.
I know people that I probably wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for social media. I know [my friend] met one of his close friends while playing Valorant. It’s not really social media, but it kind of shows how these platforms can give you an online community in a sense. I feel like that is really helpful for certain people who have a niche interest that isn’t shared by their friends at school or people they meet in a traditional social setting. I can see that being a really beneficial use of social media.
One of my friends, Chris Turingan, actually has a social media account, and he’s a creator in a sense. He’s not like a top creator, but his bouldering content gets a handful of views. When I go to some of the climbing gyms with him and drive there, now and then we’ll just see someone come up to him and say, “Hey, are you Chris from Instagram?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And then they’re like, “Yo, I love your videos.” And they just meet like that.
And honestly, I remember when I first got into climbing and bouldering, my entire For You page was entirely climbing videos. I’ll say it again: social media is a good spot to find other people in your kind of niche, whether it be an extracurricular, a profession, or a casual activity. Social media allows you to meet and develop friendships with other people who are also interested in these niches.