Social media is no longer a passing trend or a casual distraction; it has become a permanent part of how life is experienced, observed, and shared. It sits in our pockets, shapes our news, influences our politics, and controls the way major events reach the public. Consider how the world learned about the murder of George Floyd. A cellphone video captured the horror, and that video spread through social media with a speed and force that traditional journalism could never match. The protests that followed were organized, documented, and understood largely through online platforms. In a similar way, the first public account of the October 1, 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, did not come from a television broadcast or a newspaper headline. It came from a tweet posted about ten minutes after the first shots were fired, while the attack was still unfolding. This is the new reality. Information now moves faster than our ability to process it, and the very tools that connect us also complicate our sense of truth. Social media is here to stay, and that means we must understand both its extraordinary power and its serious dangers. It is not simply a matter of liking or disliking these platforms; it is a matter of recognizing that they have fundamentally changed how we see the world and how we see each other.
For social scientists, social media has opened up exciting new possibilities for research. Unlike traditional surveys or interviews, which take time and rely on small samples, social media provides an enormous amount of real-time data. Researchers can observe millions of messages as they are posted, track public emotions before and after major events, and isolate the emotional changes caused by those events. They can also compare reactions across different locations and topics, offering insights into how communities respond to tragedy, crisis, and political upheaval. This kind of data has already been used to assess the social costs of terrorism, crime, COVID-19 lockdowns, and mass shootings, including the devastating attacks in Las Vegas and El Paso. But there are also clear limitations. It is difficult to identify the socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds of the people posting messages. Locations are often vague or imprecise, and exact geographic data is rare. Perhaps more troubling, social media is filled with fake accounts spreading false information. Despite these challenges, the research potential is immense. A single tweet contains more than 150 data variables, including the time it was posted, the full text, the user’s handle, and sometimes location information. Researchers can extract hashtags and emojis from the full text, with special attention paid to “yellow face” emojis that express emotions. These emojis can be sorted into categories based on the psychological framework developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, which identifies six primary emotions: happiness, surprise, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger, with neutral as an additional category. Other emojis, such as a mask or a syringe, can be grouped into bundles related to specific topics like healthcare or medicine. This allows researchers to analyze sentiment at a scale and depth that was previously unimaginable.
One of the most powerful tools for understanding social media sentiment is the analysis of hashtags and how they evolve over time. Hashtags are not just labels; they are windows into collective emotion and belief. In a recent paper called “How Misinformation Spreads through Twitter,” one of the researchers, Mary Blankenship, examined a collection of tweets curated by UNLV Libraries, focusing on the ways false claims circulated after the Las Vegas shooting. The study revealed a stark contrast between hashtags that spread misinformation and hashtags used by people attempting to fact-check those claims. False narratives gained traction quickly and persisted, while correction efforts struggled to keep up. This is partly because social media is populated not only by real people but also by bots, trolls, and cyborgs, accounts that blend automated activity with human manipulation. These actors can dramatically amplify false content. A striking example is that an analysis found 61 percent of President Trump’s followers were likely bots, spam accounts, propaganda, or inactive profiles. At the same time, social media has become a primary source of news for a huge portion of the population. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2019, 72 percent of Americans had at least one social media account, and about two-thirds of Americans occasionally got their news from social media platforms. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, usage has increased even further. The combination of massive reach, automated manipulation, and human vulnerability creates a perfect breeding ground for confusion and distrust.
The term “fake news” is often thrown around as an accusation against information people simply disagree with, but the deeper problems are misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Together, these can be described as information pollution. Misinformation is false information shared without the intent to deceive, disinformation is false information created and shared deliberately to cause harm, and malinformation is genuine information shared with the intention of causing damage, often by taking something out of context or exposing private details. These categories differ in terms of intent and accuracy, but the potential for harm is equally serious. The 2016 presidential election made this disturbingly clear, as false stories generated more engagement and attention than factually reliable news. The Council of Europe developed a framework called Information Disorder to explain the different phases, elements, and players involved in this phenomenon. The framework helps us see how false information is created, produced, distributed, and amplified, and why it is so difficult to stop. One major factor is that users can hide or fabricate their identities while creating content that reaches millions of people. Once a false message is launched, it can easily spread into news coverage and publications, which are then referenced back in social media posts, creating a never-ending cycle of information pollution. Misinformation is especially likely to spread when it taps into strong emotional reactions such as anger, fear, or a feeling of moral superiority against another group. It is not simply about being wrong; it is about exploiting human psychology to gain attention, influence opinion, and deepen divisions.
The case study of tweets related to the October 1 shooting in Las Vegas provides a sobering example of how misinformation operates in real time. Among the most popular false claims were that the Islamic State was responsible for the attack, that the shooter was a member of antifa, and that the shooter was an Islamic convert. None of these claims were true, yet they were shared and reshared by a large number of users. The number of false claims was typically much higher than the number of attempts to correct them, and the fact-checking tweets faded away much more quickly than the tweets repeating false narratives. Interestingly, the majority of tweets containing false information came from people living in or strongly connected to the United States. This suggests that misinformation is not simply a foreign conspiracy; it is also a homegrown problem tied to political identity, social identity, and emotional reactions to tragedy. There are no easy solutions. Increased public regulation and better education for individual users can help reduce the risks, but regulation is a double-edged sword. Actions taken to regulate misinformation and disinformation often lead to declining transparency and greater control over media, which is the opposite of what a healthy democracy needs. Transparency should be encouraged, not restricted. At the same time, ordinary users already have access to tools like Botometer and Hoaxy, which can help them identify whether an account is automated or whether a piece of information has been fact-checked. The problem is that most people do not know these tools exist or do not take the time to use them. Government and social media companies need to work together more closely to address these challenges, but instead, there is often retaliation from the executive branch, including attempts to strip away the legal protections that allow websites to create and moderate their own platforms. This creates an unstable environment where no one is fully responsible for the spread of harmful content.
Ultimately, social media has become central to our lives, our understanding of the world, and even our ability to conduct timely and meaningful research. It has enormous potential to connect people, expose injustice, and give voice to the voiceless. The video of George Floyd’s murder is a powerful reminder of that potential. But social media also carries serious risks, and misinformation is perhaps the most important of those risks. As social media continues to play an expanding role in political discourse, it becomes increasingly urgent for users to educate themselves about the dangers, and for public regulation to step in where possible without sacrificing transparency. We cannot simply abandon these platforms, nor should we accept them as they are. We must learn to navigate them with critical awareness, compassion, and a commitment to truth. The research method described here, developed jointly by Mary Blankenship and Carol Graham and made possible through Brookings Mountain West, a partnership between the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, offers a valuable starting point for understanding how social media shapes our emotions and our beliefs. But the responsibility does not rest only with researchers. It rests with all of us. In a world where a single tweet can reach millions before the first shot stops echoing, we all have a role to play in deciding what we share, what we believe, and what kind of information environment we want to create for future generations.