The Noise We Mistake for Awareness: What Social Media Is Doing to the Way We Think

It was late evening when the video arrived in a WhatsApp group.

Nobody knew who had sent it first. That is how these things usually begin. A forwarded clip, a short caption, a few angry words. Within minutes it had moved to another group, and then another. Someone added a name. Someone attached a community. Someone found the political angle. One person asked whether it was true. Nobody replied.
By the time someone finally said the clip was old, from another place entirely, it no longer mattered. The first version had travelled with anger. The correction arrived with boredom.

The post moved faster than the truth. It almost always does.

This is one of the quiet dangers of our time. We are constantly informed, constantly connected, constantly reacting. But connection is not the same as understanding. Reaction is not the same as awareness. And noise, no matter how loud, is not the same as wisdom.

We do not always notice this because it feels like participation. We share because we care. We comment because we are angry. We react because silence feels wrong. But somewhere between the forward button and the comment box, something has changed in the way we think. Not in our opinions. In the machinery underneath our opinions. The part of us that weighs things, doubts things, sits with things before deciding.
We are not always becoming more aware. Sometimes we are only becoming louder.

A country online, but not always informed

India is now one of the most connected societies on earth. By late 2025, the country had crossed 1.03 billion internet users, with around 500 million active social media user identities. WhatsApp alone reaches more than five hundred million people in India.

This is extraordinary, and it is worth saying honestly. A farmer can watch a government announcement on his phone. A student in a small town can learn from a lecture recorded across the world. A citizen can document injustice in real time, without waiting for a newspaper or a gatekeeper to permit them. The internet gave ordinary people a voice, and that is not a small thing. For many, it is the only microphone they have ever been handed.
But every gift carries a weight. The same tool that exposes injustice can spread a lie with equal efficiency. The platform does not know the difference. It only knows what travels.

And what travels should worry us. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report found that 53 percent of surveyed Indian respondents identified WhatsApp as the biggest channel for false or misleading information, the highest such figure among the markets surveyed. Not because WhatsApp is evil. But because the most dangerous information is often not the post from a stranger. It is the forward from someone we know. A relative. A friend. A respected elder.

A forwarded message does not feel like propaganda when it comes from someone we trust.
That is exactly why it works.

Why falsehood travels faster

Researchers at MIT conducted one of the largest studies ever done on how information moves online, examining the spread of true and false stories on Twitter over more than a decade.What they found should make us rethink how we use these platforms. False news travelled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in every category they studied. Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be shared, and false news reached its first fifteen hundred people about six times faster than the truth.

And it was not bots doing this. It was people.

This is the uncomfortable part. The problem is not only technology. It is us.
False information carries novelty. It surprises us. It confirms something we already fear. It makes us feel morally awake. A calm correction rarely gives anyone that feeling. The human mind is not a neutral machine waiting for facts. It is emotional, tribal, shaped by fear, loyalty, memory, and belonging. People do not always share because they have verified. They share because it feels true. Because outrage, somewhere along the way, became a form of belonging.

Studies of online moral outrage suggest that social reinforcement, the likes, the shares, the approval of the crowd, can train people to express more outrage over time. Content that once shocked us becomes ordinary, and the stream serves us something stronger. A person who began with a reasonable opinion can end up, a few years later, sharing things they once would not have believed. The journey happened one scroll at a time, invisibly, the way all habits form.

In a peaceful society, this is dangerous. In a wounded society, it is explosive.

The mirror we mistake for a window

The feed we scroll every day is not a window into the world. It is a mirror. The algorithm watches what we pause on, what we like, what makes us angry enough to comment, and quietly serves us more of the same. Not to deceive us. Because that is what keeps us scrolling, and scrolling is what it was built for.
Two people can live in the same country, the same town, even the same house, and see two completely different worlds on their phones. Each feed feels complete. Neither person knows that half the picture was filtered out before they ever opened their eyes.

And repetition does the rest. The more often we encounter a claim, the more true it feels, regardless of whether it is. A person leaning slightly one way is shown more of that way, then a stronger version, then a version with an enemy attached. Month by month, the middle disappears from their screen, and their position feels not extreme but obvious.

Some people reach the point where even a proven falsehood does not move them. The clip was fake, yes, but it could have been true. The lie is defended because it points in the right direction. Each side ends up with its own feed, its own facts, its own reality, and genuine conversation between them becomes almost impossible.
This same certainty shows up everywhere now, not only in feeds but in conversation. The people with the most certainty are very often the people with the least knowledge. A person who has read one caption has no contradictions to manage. A person who has actually studied a conflict, or lived inside one, carries complexity that does not fit in a comment. So the shallow voice speaks loudly, the deep voice hesitates, and the algorithm amplifies the wrong one. Online spaces slowly teach us that hesitation is weakness, that nuance is betrayal, that asking for evidence means you are against the cause. Not because people stop having intelligence, but because platforms train intelligence to move in the direction of applause.

Nobody chose this. The feed decided, one scroll at a time, and called it personalisation.

The room where corrections never arrive

Public misinformation, at least, is visible. It can be challenged, reported, fact-checked in the open. Private misinformation is different. It travels inside closed groups, family circles, and community pages where trust is already built in.

In many Indian homes, WhatsApp is not treated like social media. It is treated like conversation. The message arrives beside birthday wishes, prayer images, family news, and health advice. A verified report and an edited poster sit one below the other. A doctor's advice and a fake cure arrive with the same green tick.
A false claim enters a closed group easily. A correction almost never does. Fact-checkers publish their work in public, but the rumour lives in private, moving from home to home, carried by people who believe they are helping. By the time truth knocks, the door is already closed.
This is how confusion enters ordinary life. Not through one grand conspiracy. Through everyday forwarding, done with love.

What a wounded society should understand deeply

For places already carrying pain, this is not an abstract issue.
This country has seen it before. In 2012, tens of thousands of people from Northeast India, working and studying in cities across the country, packed their bags and fled home within days. Not because violence had reached them. Because messages had. Officials later pointed to morphed images, threatening messages, and organised online rumours as part of what fuelled the panic. But by then the trains were already full. Fear does not wait for verification.

And in Manipur, through three years of conflict, misinformation has not been a side effect of the violence. It has been fuel. Videos stripped of context. Old images presented as new atrocities. Rumours moving through communities faster than any fact could follow, hardening certainty on every side about what the other side is. Reporters Without Borders noted that disinformation has flourished in this environment, feeding hostilities in a conflict that has taken more than 260 lives and displaced around 60,000 people since May 2023.
When society is already wounded, information does not travel on neutral ground. It travels through pain. A rumour in such a place can make parents afraid to send children outside. It can turn neighbours into suspects. Every falsehood lands on soil that has been prepared by real grief. That is what makes it catch.

None of this means people should be silent. Speaking out matters. Documentation matters. But speaking is not the same as forwarding everything, and defending your people does not require becoming careless with facts. In a conflict, truth is not a luxury. It is protection. The people sharing unverified content are rarely villains. They are frightened, or grieving, and the post in front of them confirms what the fear already whispered. That is the cruelty of the design. It turns love of your own people into the very mechanism that deepens the wound.

Governments, for their part, often respond with the bluntest tool available. Manipur has lived through repeated internet blackouts since the conflict began. Among residents, a sentiment is often heard that deserves to be remembered: whenever there is a problem, they blame the internet, not the issue. Shutdowns may slow some rumours, but they also block emergency communication, education, livelihoods, journalism, and the ability of ordinary people to verify what is actually happening. And when information is controlled too easily from above, truth itself begins to depend on permission. A society cannot build digital responsibility by cutting the wire. The answer cannot only come from above. It must also come from below.

What we owe one another now

What we do repeatedly becomes who we are. If we repeatedly react before reading, we become impatient thinkers. If we repeatedly share before verifying, we become carriers of confusion. This is not only a social media problem. It is a society problem. The habits we practise online do not remain online. They enter our homes, our politics, our friendships, changing how quickly we suspect one another. A society that reacts before it reflects becomes easy to divide, and easy to provoke.

Children learn responsibility from the smallest habits of home, from something as ordinary as a plate left on the table. The same truth applies here, because a phone is now also a home, and a group chat is now also a public space. We teach children not to shout fire in a crowded room because panic can hurt people. A WhatsApp group is also a crowded room. A society that wants civic sense must now teach digital civic sense too, and the habits are the same size as the ones at the dinner table. Small. Repeated. Quietly decisive. Who sent this? Is it old? Who benefits if I share it?

This responsibility does not only belong to ordinary people forwarding messages. News today is shaped as much by influencers, page admins, and anonymous handles as by journalists, and UNESCO found that 62 percent of surveyed digital content creators did not carry out rigorous and systematic fact-checking before sharing, even though most wanted training to do so. Influence has moved faster than responsibility, and it should be measured by care, not only by reach.

The solution is not to leave social media. These same spaces organise relief during floods, expose injustice, and keep families connected, and during blackouts they have sometimes been the only window left open. The solution is to become better citizens inside these spaces. Schools should teach media literacy the way they teach writing and arithmetic. Families should discuss online responsibility the way they discuss manners and discipline.
But beneath all of it, something smaller and harder is being asked of each of us. Remembering the difference between noise and awareness, and choosing awareness even though it costs more. Real awareness is slow. It can hold a question for a week without an answer. It can say the three words the internet has almost made extinct: I don't know. There is courage in speaking, and we should never stop speaking against injustice. But there is also courage in pausing, in refusing to forward something that may harm people, even when everyone around you is forwarding it. In correcting your own side, which is the hardest courage of all.
The post will always move fast. The algorithm will always reward emotion. The crowd will always tempt us to join before we think.

But a society does not become wise by moving at the speed of its anger. It becomes wise when enough people decide that truth is worth waiting for.

Later tonight, in some group, another video will arrive.
The phone will light up. The caption will already know what to feel. The forwards will already be moving.
And for a second, before the thumb moves, there will be a small space. The space between seeing and sharing, between feeling and knowing, between reaction and thought.
Everything in the design of these platforms is built to close that space.
The noise will continue.
What we do inside that small space is still ours.

Dr Ronaldo Laishram is an Astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, originally from Manipur, and is actively involved in education, science outreach, and youth development initiatives. Opinions expressed are the author's own.