Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc. Previous generations couldn't do that so easily. So a complete distrust of news shouldn't be surprising.. they aren't really very trustworthy in the first place.

These teens don't need to trust the instagram accounts, which is the whole point. The account just makes a post to bring up a discussion point, whether or not that point is fact-checked is irrelevant. (Its mostly gossip with political/moral/idealogical/etc angles anyway)/

Reminds me of one of the main reasons I enjoy discussions on HN so much.

> ...instead of just depending on one source giving us information... The fact that we’re all posting about these things means we all have to do research

Therein lies the rub - how do you vet the "research" of your peers in content that seems to largely not cite references? My guess is that they are likely to be using the same sources of information without realizing or acknowledging it.

I mean they probably are. It’s unlikely these kids are running their Instagram channels as loss leaders with the real goal of selling billion dollar military technology.

Given the state of conventional news, can you blame them? Foxnews is just a republican party news organization. And everything else ( CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYTimes, NPR, etc ) are a democratic party news organization.

It is sad that news has become so political and none of it is reliable. It's just one political side lying, exaggerating, clickbaiting and hating the other political side. It's a political/news war and the first casualty of any war is the truth.

Maybe it was always this way and I was just too young and naive to notice.

> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).

As long as they don't censor, it won't be an echo chamber. Social media only becomes an echo chamber when the company takes sides. Sadly, google, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc are being forced to take sides with disastrous results. It doesn't help that formerly trusted organizations like the SPLC and ADL have turned extremely biased and unreliable.

The worst part is that news companies are at the forefront of pushing for censoring on the internet. Which creates more echo chambers, which creates more divisions. But I suppose that is good for ratings and that's all that matters to news companies. Not truth, not objectivity. Just ratings.

Given how toxic news media has gotten, it's better than teens stay away from it entirely. How many adults go insane watching CNN, MSNBC or Foxnews? Too many. The news industry has only itself to blame for it's predicament. Nobody trust news for a reason.

Yep, groupthink runs rampant on social media, just as it does on HN and other fora.

This thread will generate the usual boilerplate blathering about "Faux News" and "Wapo" and on and on and on, when the total news output of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WP, and the rest of the outlets that get people all frothing at the mouth and picking up their tribal pitchforks and torches is less than 1% of the actual news published in America on any given day.

The people who seem the most upset by the state of news today are the people who consume only from a few national sources, but never think to pick up their local newspaper where there are actual stories about the actual places they live that affect them in ways they don't even know because they can't be bothered with dead tree editions.

They use a lot of lame echo-chamber excuses about "portability this" and "digital future that" to explain away their laziness. Plus 20- and 30-somethings these days are unwilling to pay 50¢ for some factual information to accompany their $8.00 coffee and their $1,000 phones.

It may be hard for some people to grip, but 99.99999% of the news stories published in an average day have nothing to do with Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. But you'd never know it if the internet is the only way you consume information.

What happens in the White House or Congress or the United Nations or North Korea affects people infinitely less than the new water main going in down the street, or how a local politician is spending their money, or whether it was their neighbor's kid who got killed in that bad rollover crash you saw on your way home from work.

For the record, I subscribe to five newspapers and one magazine. Three of the newspapers are in printed form. Of those, one newspaper is local, the others come by mail from other cities where I have interests. The magazine is also in print form, and comes weekly. The remaining two newspapers are digital. My wife subscribes to an industry journal which arrives in printed form DAILY as a broadsheet, six days a week, and has a supplemental app for breaking news.

The printed articles she pulls from her newspaper and leaves on my desk for me to read are generally a week to 10 days ahead of the internet.

When my newspapers arrive, the first thing I do is pull out the Opinion sections and toss them in the blue bin. America would be better off if newspapers didn't have opinion sections to reinforce all of society's divisiveness. It was OK back when cities had six or seven daily newspapers. But today, it's a disservice to the public.

I also pull out the comics section/page and read that first. If I don't manage to get past that much of a particular paper, it's still time well spent.

Judging by the handles of these accounts it wouldn't surprise me with kids only followed accounts that aligned with their current beliefs which may end up leading to the echo chamber you previously mentioned (however I must disagree that it's not the direct copy and pasting that makes it an echo chamber, its the copy and pasting of ideas). But also because of the online and pseudonymous nature of the internet it also wouldn't surprise me if people also joined communities that didn't align with their beliefs just to experiment with them. Perhaps even engage in more civilized debates on Instagram than in /r/the_donald.

But also as an occasional user of Instagram I find it weird for them to even be having long winded debates on the app. It was designed to be a photosharing app with comments, not a place for discussion threads. But maybe I'm too old now ‍️

Imho that's a bit simplified. While the article doesn't actually mention this, I'm very convinced that this is also the result of news media increasingly relying on social media for their reporting themselves.

At this point, even traditional old-school media like TV and print are constantly quoting social media posts when reporting on something. Used to be that big media outlets would at least interview renowned experts, but that seems to be largely replaced by "Jonny on Twitter said".

For people as young as those in the article, this must be literally the only "news media" they've ever known, but they grew up with social media, so traditional news media just quoting social media is kinda redundant to them, as they are usually so familiar with social media that they don't need the traditional media as a "middleman" but could just as well look up these responses themselves without having them get "filtered" by a media outlet.

> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).

I also wouldn't be too surprised if a couple of these, supposedly 13 years old, admins turn out to be actual adults who are getting paid for pushing certain agendas.

It seems not any different than subreddits or similar: they just making inflammatory meme posts based on hot topics and then people are discussing them in in the moderated comments.