The Rise of Desensitization of Teens on Social Media

ON AVERAGE, TEENAGERS SPEND OVER THREE HOURS A DAY ON SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS. DURING THEIR DAILY SCROLLING SESSIONS, THEY CAN COME ACROSS EXTREMELY VIOLENT CONTENT.

*Victoria Cintron was a student in the College Now Introduction to Journalism class at the City College of New York.

Leah Harmon, 18, and Jose Moreta, 17, are teenagers who both had unlimited internet access from a young age. With a wide range of content to see at a young age, they both viewed gruesome videos that they say they regret seeing so young.

When asked about a specific moment in which he saw a creepy video, Moreta recalled watching a video on YouTube as a child that was explaining Live Leak, a currently permanently shut down website. 

A curious child, Moreta still went ahead and searched up the website where he discovered videos, or CCTV footage, of people dying. “I think it was a very rude awakening of the fact that not everything is very sunshine and rainbows,” he said of what went through his head when he first saw the videos. 

“When you’re a kid,” Moreta continued, “you don’t really think of people dying or other people killing other people or the way a body looks when it’s dead or the way blood looks.” 

Burjis Cooper, a 32-year-old music teacher who had grown up in the early years of the World Wide Web and has seen the way it can alter the perspectives of children, said in an email that, “unfortunately, we are hardwired for violence (among other things) to get our attention.”

“Marketers know this,” Cooper added, “producers know this, and I’d say social media creators more than now know this,”

Teenagers in this day and age have grown up with the internet. They have seen it evolve and understand how broad access to it is. But the internet has its dark sides, and in the early years, those sites were prominent for kids to find. The minimum age to have a social media account in the US is 13 years old, yet 40% of children from ages 8-12 find a way to access it. Teenagers spend an average 3.5 hours a day on social media accounts, constantly scrolling through common apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok where they can come across explicit content. While young people may eventually learn of these kinds of darker topics, seeing this kind of content when they do can contribute to a lack of empathy—a normalization.  

Kids who have seen or heard violence online while growing up can become desensitized to it to an extent. In school, students joke around with each other, often making light of things that have garnered traction in the media.

In some instances, these jokes can come off as offensive and disrespectful. Certain jokes made about Jeffery Epstein, ICE, Sean “Diddy” Combs, or politicians who have a history of sexual assault go beyond funny conversations and can lead to desensitization about real-world harm. 

Harmon told me, “you get so desensitized that you make it a joke.” 

“I never knew that something that is so serious and so sickening to other people,” the now-18-year-old said. 

Sometimes humor is used to cope with what is happening in the world or to make jokes if they are educated in what they are talking about. Even Moreta admitted “I am somebody that has created jokes about these types of situations and stuff because of how things are portrayed in social media.” He understands that there are people his age who are being willfully ignorant but there are those who understand where the boundary lies. 

The rise of desensitization within adolescents raises concerns on if future generations will succumb to the numbness that viewing violence and war so often can bring. Still, there is optimism that the opposite can occur. While discussing what the future may bring, Cooper, the music teacher, said: “Hopefully with these generations who grew up with the technology now becoming parents, we can better resist and teach our kids about the dangers the same way my generation dismissed smoking and binge drinking compared to prior generations.” 

His stance was different from Harmon and Moreta, who shared similar concerns that the increase in desensitization will make things worse for future children who will be born into the new internet age. 

The future when it comes to desensitized teenagers is unknown. As Cooper puts it, “kids are programmed to push the boundaries so that they can find them, and I think it is our job as adults to define the boundaries while remaining patient for all the missteps along the way.”

As a teacher, Cooper believes it is important to zoom out and see the big picture. Like he said, “it isn’t satisfying, but in a free society it is necessary to accept the messy steps forward and backward as the soul of a people decides on what’s important.”