Scroll, Share, Repeat

Scroll, Share, Repeat: The Ethics of What We Believe and Spread

It happens almost subconsciously. I open my phone to check a message, and suddenly an hour has passed. A video about a celebrity scandal leads to a protest clip, and then to a “must-see” thread about political corruption. My emotions shift by the second—from being angry, to entertained, to heartbroken, to amused. It feels like I’m seeing the entire world in just the palm of my hands, but really, the world I’m seeing has already been chosen for me. Every scroll feels like a choice, but it isn’t. Every share feels like my voice, but it isn’t either.

The truth is, the media we consume and the stories we describe aren’t neutral. They’re built on someone else’s agenda, and our only defense is the way in which we question, interpret, and share them.

Our values are skewed the moment we step onto a media platform, and it’s especially potent when we see media that reinforces a prior belief. In a world where every swipe gives us another opinion dressed up as a fact, the fine line between truth and fiction blurs quickly. That’s why our ethical responsibility in using and consuming media goes beyond avoiding lies; it’s about pausing, questioning, and recognizing how every story we share has the power to shape someone else’s beliefs and sense of reality.

In Eli Saslow’s ‘Nothing on This Page Is Real’: How Lies Become Truth in Online America, the danger of uncritical consumption becomes painfully evident. Saslow tells the story of Christopher Blair, a man who began writing fake news as a joke but accidentally created a massive online following. Blair would sit at his computer each morning thinking about what lie to post next, things such as “Hillary Clinton had died during a secret overseas mission” (Saslow) or “Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9” (Saslow). Moreover, Saslow writes that “what Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker” (Saslow). That darkness was the series of fabricated lies that spread to millions worldwide.

But that darkness doesn’t just come from the person who makes the lie, but also from the millions of us who spread it. Many people are so quick to hit “share” if a headline makes them feel right or righteous. For example, on Blair's posts, he had often written “Share if you’re outraged” and “thousands of people on Facebook had clicked ‘like’ and then ‘share,’ most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire” (Saslow). Even though Blair’s site included fourteen disclaimers, one of which even stated, “Nothing on this page is real” (Saslow), the damage could not be prevented. Despite the numerous disclaimers, people still shared his stories without checking. Instead, “Blair's page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55” (Saslow). Saslow’s story demonstrates that misinformation thrives on emotional reaction.

And it’s easier to forward outrage than to fact-check it. The ethical failure isn’t just on people who make the initial post, like Blair; it’s collective. That’s why we must approach the media with caution, because acting out of emotion can cause us to skip over critical details, including their authenticity. As media users, we carry the weight and power of what we choose to amplify, even when our intentions feel harmless.

I first confronted the danger of believing what I wanted to see during the 2020 election. My social media feed was filled with articles and videos that looked and sounded real but turned out to be written by anonymous accounts or meme pages. Many videos claiming to have “substantial evidence of voter fraud” had been spread to and shared by many people I knew. When I traced it back, it led to a satire page. Almost everyone on the internet has been in this sort of situation, it’s practically unavoidable. But it begs the question, why do we keep falling for these lies, and why do we keep sharing them?

Chris Hayes explains it best in On the Internet, We’re Always Famous. He describes the modern internet as an overwhelming sensory experience, comparing it to the exaggerated hearing of a desert fox: “you can eavesdrop on each and every conversation. At first you are thrilled, because it is thrilling to peer into the private world of another person” (Hayes). But then, like all things that seem too good to be true, it comes crashing down, inflicting a “sensory overload. You suddenly hear everything at once—snippets of conversation, shrieks, footsteps—all of it too much and too loud” (Hayes). This image captures how it feels to be online, the endless chatter, constant noise, everyone talking at once. It starts to consume you until it’s all that you think about .

Furthermore, Hayes argues that this environment has made us performers, people who put on an act and paint a false reality, and he’s right, “Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers” (Hayes). He puts this phenomenon best in the words “Era of Mass Fame” (Hayes), a time when the combination of “mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses... into the project of impressing strangers” (Hayes). By being under the gaze of so many, people are often pressured to put on a mask and appear a certain way.

I’ve felt this truth before myself. One afternoon, I spent twenty minutes rewriting an “about me” for a slideshow that maybe five people would read. I wasn’t trying to express myself honestly; I was trying to sound smart and exaggerate my accomplishments. It’s strange how easily the desire for validation and “likes” creeps in. Hayes captures that perfectly. Online we don't just consume media; we become it. Our ethical responsibility is to resist this system by not feeding into the machine that rewards exaggeration and false truths rather than honesty.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted this decades ago when he stated “The medium is the message” . He meant that the form of communication shapes how we think and behave more than the content itself. Platforms like TikTok and Twitter turn even serious topics into entertainment because that’s what their design rewards. When the form of communication values attention over truth, every user must decide whether to participate responsibly or feed the noise.

The platforms we use don’t just carry information, they create it, reshape it, and reshape us in the process. Platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube all have one message: stay here, keep watching, keep sharing. And as we obey, the medium molds our values.

But there’s still a choice left to us. Our responsibility isn’t just to consume ethically, it’s to resist the pull of the medium itself. To slow down when everything demands speed. To ask questions when others won’t. To share only what we’ve thought about long enough to stand behind. In the end, McLuhan was right: “The medium is the message”. But whether that message becomes noise or knowledge, that part is still in our hands.

Work Cited

Hayes, Chris. “On the Internet, We’re Always Famous.” New Yorker, 24 Sep. 2021,

https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.

]Saslow, Eli. “ ‘Nothing on this page is real:’ How lies become truth in online America.”

Washington Post, 17 Nov. 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.