I'm writing about this mostly because I've fallen victim to it myself and it is important to acknowledge where we all fall short. I struggle with keeping myself from falling into the sharing loop, which, may I stress, is different from just sharing things. It starts off with just sharing. You find bits of information and petitions that you think are important and that you need to share, so you repost it on your story, but then it escalates.

From what I've seen, there has been a moral value placed on how much you share and how active you are, so if you don't do enough then you are a "bad" person. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a form of OCD that focuses on my morality. I often obsess about whether I am a good person or a bad person and any actions that may make me seem bad I avoid, compulsively. I'm so driven by my OCD to do enough to not be a bad person that I will just share and share and share. It gets to a point where I'm not even taking much information in. I'm just putting it on my story until I feel like it's enough for me to be a good person.

Many people struggle with this, even people who don't have moral OCD. Humans are very attached to our morality and how others perceive it, so if you make a big deal out of sharing a certain amount of times to be a good person, of course people will fall into a loop of just sharing and not actually absorbing the information. When we don't pay attention to the information we share, that's how we end up with a ton of false and/or harmful information being spread to thousands of people.

It is so important that we remove the fear component associated with our morality and not promote toxic content that places a moral value on how much we post, so when we do post, it is information we've paid attention to and things we genuinely want to post. It's a lot better and healthier for everyone that way.

We know that social media activism is impacting the mental health of many, but we are not realizing why. We blame it on the inherent nature of activism even though when looking at substantive levels of activism, we don't have this massive issue of people burning out and feeling immense pressure. It is a phenomenon unique to social media activism due to the unrealistic and fear-driven expectations placed on people to repost and be involved in order to still be considered a good person. Some people spend so much time trying to post and repost that it ends up causing burnout and the activism no longer feels genuine. It feels forced. This is problematic.

I know a lot of people say these things in order to get others to be more active and involved so we can get things done, but I don't care how well intentioned it is, it's not actually helpful. When considering basic ethics and human decency, you can't force involvement and you certainly cannot scare people into being involved. That's not okay. Many of us struggle with mental illness and sensitivity, so these things are not taken lightly with us and can impact us very negatively. This fear-driven participation has only resulted in a loop that makes us blind to harmful information and susceptible to activism burnout. We're consistently burning out most of our supporters and enabling the spread of very harmful information, so what more are we actually getting done?

Since the start of the movement, a decent amount of people have just completely dropped it. Granted, a lot of those people were performative activists, but you had burnout people drop too. Then in addition to them, the amount of work and effort people have just put into social media activism in general has dropped significantly. Everyone got burnt out from going 3000% for 3 months straight on story reposting, whereas people who are performing bigger actions through more responsible means are experiencing less burnout or, at the very least, delayed burnout.

We've gone backwards by a lot. We had a good trajectory for all the change we could do via social media, but it is not being lived up to because we burned ourselves out with harsh self-imposed rules.

A lot of people excuse this phenomenon due to the notion that activism requires sacrifice, which it does, but when we are sacrificing, it is always in the best interest of the success of the movement and the people. We are not succeeding with this level of sacrifice. We are slowly failing. You can't have a successful movement when most people in it are just burnt out zombies doing the bare minimum to be okay. It's honestly like we shot ourselves in the foot with this one.

That's not to say nothing has come out of this. A decent amount of steps in the right direction were taken, but we could've taken more steps and bigger steps with a stronger force. It's a force we don't have and the one we do have is getting weaker.

We could've had a force made up of people who genuinely care. People who post things on their story as they see fit and not out of fear. People who take time to read through posts in order to catch any nasty mistakes because they enjoy being educated and not because they are trying to meet this expectation. People who are doing everything they can and not everything some toxic members tell them to do in order to achieve something greater.

We could've gotten a lot more work done with a stable group of healthy supporters instead of a chaotic hoard of zombie supporters.

Tip: If you are also worried about being perceived as a bad person by not doing enough, here are some words of wisdom I've learned in treatment and research

1. Enough is a huge grey area of uncertainty because we all have different opinions on what is enough and there's no possible way to concretely define what enough means for everyone.

2. You have to sit with the uncertainty of whether or not you are doing enough and just live. You can't be anxious about something you can't determine for sure. Do what you feel is enough while also still actively contributing to a cause.

3. Whether you are a good or bad person isn't determined by one thing or two things or even a hundred things. Good and bad as concrete descriptors are an illusion. People exist on a spectrum. Do you think it's accurate to assume someone is a completely bad person because they don't post "enough" on their social media? Read that as many times as you need to in order to realize how stupid it sounds.

4. You can't control how people view you or your actions. You have to sit with the uncertainty of the idea that someone might think you're an awful person for not posting enough. Don't dwell on it or ruminate. Move on with the uncertainty of the situation.

The Ohio State University

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