In our personal experience, some members have seen various hurricane news on various stories and reels, while others have had no news show up. We discussed what we use social media for and how we get news stories and we found that some of the people in the group get news stories from X (twitter) and commented on the speed of delivery. While others in the group said they got much of their news about natural disasters and and specifically the hurricane Helene response from Instagram.

On social media people are not looking for a discussion, influencers simply say ‘help these people’ and that doesn’t feel valuable. Something more substantial would be real people discussing the issue and something more impactful being done. We’ve found that it is unrealistic and hard to truly care about each and every social issue and find a way to support them all. The level of social awareness has numbed the true helpful response from the general public.

Specifically, the Helene response has been impactful in reaching people that can help donate and that was truly because of how disastrous it was. There are many hurricanes and natural disasters that have happened all around America and other countries and the social media response has been a bit underwhelming. So we believe the impact of social media is truly based on how it is swayed and how the public responds and boosts certain posts or ignore them in favor of a funny cat video.