Editor’s note: This letter is a response to a previous editorial, “Education, jobs take precedence over reading news for millennials”, published in the Oct. 21, 2013, edition of The Daily Illini. 

The Editorial Board underestimates social media’s ability to distort our collective understanding of current events. The article argues that, in light of millennials’ time-consuming school and work commitments, participating in social media discussion about the news can be an appropriate substitute for sustained engagement with traditional media sources.

While we don’t actively engage with the news as we would with midterms or job interviews, our social media activity can still influence the outcome of newsworthy events. 

For instance, a New York Times article about the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings details how Reddit falsely identified Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown University student, as one of the suspects based on photos released by the F.B.I. In the hours before the F.B.I. revealed the suspect’s true identity to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, tweets accusing Tripathi of the bombings spread to millions of people, and Tripathi’s family received death threats online. 

Additionally, a New Yorker profile of the Steubenville High School rape case discusses how various channels reported that Steubenville officials were attempting to cover up the victim’s gang rape in front of multiple witnesses. Despite the lack of corroborating evidence for this version of events, Anonymous, an online activist collective, threatened to release the personal information of people implicated in the conspiracy. 

Social media discussion outpaced traditional investigations in both cases, producing false accounts which impacted the parties involved. Thus, because they can unwittingly make influential contributions to newsworthy events, millennials need to stay abreast of the news from a variety of reputable sources. 

The world isn’t waiting for our full-throated response to tomorrow’s newsworthy problems; it’s picking through our musings online for answers today.

Michael Eichner

Graduate student in Accounting