Some things in college never change. It's full of sleep-deprived students, eating cold pizza for breakfast, unsavory, drunken behavior, and, thankfully, still being a place where students engage with each other about politics, religion, and their general vantage point on the world. I was lucky enough my freshman year to have hall mates-turned-close-friends who would lose many sleeping hours debating the role of government and the social safety net.

Then, October 2012 came, and Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense against Hamas. We, once again, came together to discuss the general unsettling images and horrors of the region. What I found, though, was unlike domestic policies of fiscal spending and civil rights, my peers were unwilling to divulge their points of view on this issue largely because international affairs remain an issue where Americans are least informed. As Jon Stewart humorously pointed out last Thursday, while 65% of Americans support airstrikes in Syria to combat ISIS, only 50% were able to correctly identify Syria on a map. Perhaps a product of our failing education system, we still remain grossly uninformed, or worse, misinformed, about the cultural movements and dynamics outside the fifty states. For example, while some may be aware of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 (Argo was a highly popular film), few are aware of the American and British led military coup that destabilized the country in the first place. The US media works tirelessly to portray our archenemy as an egregiously inhumane state while turning a blind eye to our ally Saudi Arabia who still beheads its citizens in public squares for committing sorcery (Amel Ahmed, Aljazeera America), an outlandish legal practice reminiscent of Tudor England. None of this, though, is new information. What is new, however, is the outlet we all have now to spread misinformed, ill-informed, and simplistic ideas: social media.

This summer brought about some of the most heinous stories our generation has had to stomach. Our ability to witness the dehumanization of peoples has been tested in Gaza, Ferguson, Syria, Israel and Iraq. The problems are great, and, unfortunately, our problem-solving mechanisms are being progressively destroyed by an over-simplification of narratives limited to good vs. evil, blood-thirsty terrorists vs. pig-headed Zionists, and the rational West vs. the backwards Arabs. In conjunction with the twenty-four hour news cycle, these politically expedient narratives are perpetuated in our social feeds. During my freshman year, conversations on the Middle East were dominated by a general consensus that most were not adequately informed enough to make a clear argument. This summer, I saw these same people litter my newsfeed with propositions that were only propped up by the propaganda readily available to them. In a link shared from his fraternity brother, my close friend shared this message with his two-thousand friends: "Israel's operation in Gaza is not causing deep-seated prejudices, it is revealing them. And behind all of that hatred lies the need for Israel--the case for Jewish sovereignty is the case for Jewish safety."

Now let me be clear, the point of this essay is not to debunk or support these points. Quite frankly, that would take a few dozen more pages. It is simply to point out the ability of self-proclaimed uninformed people to distribute content with little attention to the bias of the author or the validity of the information. Furthermore, these posts that focus not only on this conflict but on Syria, Iraq, and Ferguson are almost always meant to inspire a dichotomy, a contention between two forces.

The most obvious problem is that these dichotomies are largely untrue. Iran commits gross human rights violations including the imprisonment of foreign and domestic journalists. It is also one of the leading forces in attacking the Islamic State even if only for sectarian loyalties. Egypt, allied with the US, has been one of the main players in brokering peace, or a continuation of the status quo depending on your own opinions. It is also an oppressive military state that recently imprisoned seven people for alleged homosexual conduct. Even our beloved USA has committed its own crimes including the infamous waterboarding scandals that culminated in President Obama's flippant admission, "We tortured some folk."

As a concession, I have also seen some social media movements that have done some good. The hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown sparked a nationwide conversation on the portrayal of minorities in the media. Still, the damage to the country's dialogue by social media platforms being treated as platforms for public opinion is too great especially since it works to confirm our own political beliefs instead of challenging them--a significant distinction from traditional debate. In early August, The New York Times published an article "How Social Media Silences Debate". It rightfully pointed out that social media "makes it easy for people to read only news and opinions from people they agree with" going even further to mention Twitter's decision to "begin showing people tweets even from people they don't follow if enough other people they follow favorite them." Even the very nature of Twitter, a platform that asks you to condense your thoughts into 140 characters or less, is by definition unfit to air such complexities.

It is a known fact that the world can be a horrifying place. As we become more connected and images from these atrocities become more readily available, some of us can't help but give it a share. Given the dire need for this country to begin a meaningful, open dialogue, about poverty, the role of government, our own human rights violations, and our, always present, race relations problem, I should hope you would all at least take a minute and think twice before clicking that share button.