While CNN blared in the background about the Affirmative Action decision, I turned to my 19-year-old brother and asked him what he thought. He responds as I’m scrolling through my friends’ stories. By now, I’ve swiped by the same, brief information post about the decision on almost everyone’s story. He says that it’s pretty bad, but offers no further explanation. After a few moments of scrolling through TikTok, he looks at me and tells me that he “doesn’t really know,” though, because he found out about the decision from an Instagram post. In the span of a few minutes, he’s decided his stance on a pretty big issue, but with just one random post to back him. How did he or my friends know that these posts are truthful? Everyone was reposting something about the decision, but no one was saying where exactly the information came from.

Despite this path of inevitable failure of facts versus falsities, on July 4, 2023, President Biden was limited from contacting social media companies. According to Reuters, the ruling arrived as a result of a 2022 lawsuit between Republican attorney generals in Louisiana and Missouri, who felt that “U.S. government officials went too far in efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy.” Thus, on July 4th, a U.S. federal judge ruled that federal agencies and the Biden administration were restricted from communicating with social media companies about content moderation, because the content is protected under free speech. For the many young, impressionable teenagers that primarily use social media to interact with the world, this is a huge loss that will forever impact the outlook on social spheres. Luckily, we can still prevent the consequences, as long as social media creators own up to their responsibility of providing accurate, well-researched information.

It’s not just misinformation that’s the issue, but also the lack of perspective. Often these so-called informative posts only talk about one side of the story, thus influencing the audience to take that side. While the facts might be right, it’s also up to creators to make sure that their posts reveal the other sides of the issue. Because stories about pressing events are shared so rapidly, any post about these events must have factual, up-to-date information. Roughly half of Americans don’t always verify information before reposting, meaning there is a responsibility for creators to report the correct information in the first place.

Once someone posts, it doesn’t take long at all for one fake story to end up on another person’s page, and then another. Teens, often in frequent touch with their friends, are pretty gullible. Few are able to tell fact versus opinion, and combined with the desire to talk to friends, warped facts are spread across the country within seconds. And like Pew Research highlights, because 67% of U.S. teens use TikTok, and 62% are on Instagram, once something gets out, it’s out.

While TikTok and Instagram already have misinformation guidelines and consequences for abusers of them in place, the system lacks reliability. It can take days to weeks for reports to be reviewed, and some reports aren’t reviewed at all. The system itself can be fixed to be more strict and sensitive, but ultimately it’s up to users to decide if they want to post accurate information. No one can stop anyone from posting. All social media users must be held accountable for anything they post; it’s their duty to make sure that their post contains the truth. Otherwise, soon enough, no one will be able to tell what’s right or wrong.

If someone is posting solely for informational purposes, the post should either come directly from a professional’s words or from a professional themself. To verify that this is something that’s happening, users would have to fill out an application to let viewers know that their content comes from someone who knows their stuff. In the same way that the blue verification mark already appears next to celebrities’ usernames, pages with trusted information can also be verified with a different kind of mark. Instead of blue, maybe these pages could have red verification marks. Further, other marks or badges can be added to profiles to further identify their authority or reputation. Verifying reputable sources is just the first step in keeping people informed.

For teens, the number of followers someone has can be blinding. Users who have a very high number of followers are deemed more trustworthy, which leads to reposts of their content from teens who follow them. Having a visible mark that denotes the reputation of that account prevents people from immediately reposting anything they see, or at least it makes teens think twice before uploading it to their story. And it’s not just teens that would benefit from such an update to the verification marks; everyone would be more well-informed.

Adolescents must learn from professionals if they ever want to become professionals. And as TikTok and Instagram’s user population grows each day, it’s more important than ever to make sure information is properly regulated on the app. Especially since the apps harbor many teen users, the future of this world. But if we continue to go down this route, where anyone with varied credentials can share any kind of information, true or false, then the future generations may fall into a pit of falsities mistaken for facts.

Information retrieved from NYTimes, Reuters, Security.org, OECD, PewResearch, and Family Online Safety Institute