Have you ever seen a firefighter in action? Despite what popular TV shows such as 911 and Chicago Fire would have you think, firefighting actually requires a lot of strategy.
When faced with a grease fire, first responders on scene are instructed to smother the fire with a heavy metal object. When an electrical fire starts, they’re trained to cut off the power supply, then use an extinguishing chemical.
Wildfires, however, are different.
They move fast, they tear communities apart, and they’re nearly impossible to extinguish. Worse still, wildfires seem to feed themselves: strong winds from the rear and dry brush from the front allow them to continue to spread. And you can’t put out a fire when both sides keep adding fuel.
“If you voted for this, watch your back.”
“The 2nd Amendment is there for a reason, TAKE THEM ALL OUT.”
“Where are the 9/11 hijackers when you really need them?”
These were all comments on controversial political videos from 2020, 2021, and 2024, respectively, by individuals from both sides of the spectrum. How can firefighters do their jobs when the people are setting new fires just like these every day?
I am not sure what was more disturbing: watching other Americans openly talk about murdering their fellow citizens, or realizing that the platforms facilitating these comments were simply allowing them without so much as a flag for review. Things like an armed insurrection and an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate, usually only seen in third-world countries facing civil conflict, have already taken place on American soil. What we are seeing today is not just acts of violence, but the possible precursors of another civil war like the one we had two hundred years ago, fueled in part by the polarization plaguing American social media.
The only way to extinguish this fire is for the United States federal government to increase its regulation of social media platforms to prevent the radicalization of America’s youth, re-establish the public’s trust in private media, and prevent the spread of political violence.
Recent years have seen a disturbing rise in politically motivated killings, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk in 2025 and the countless attempted assassinations of President Trump. And social media, it seems, is a breeding ground for those who commit atrocities such as these.
Many will declare their intentions, for weeks or months on end, through online echo chambers and positive-reinforcement algorithms, spurred on by other anonymous usernames that further fuel their spiral into madness. Despite posing a real and obvious threat to public safety, many of these users go unreported and unpenalized – meaning their exposure to the radicalizing material continues, completely unhindered, until it finally tips them over the edge.
This problem isn’t going away anytime soon. This phenomenon is a precursor to a social landscape that will soon be unrecognizable. Software engineers are quickly learning that AI can be implemented into user algorithms to create highly personalized, adaptable “For You Pages” that endlessly fortify and further radicalize the user’s political views.
This isn’t just an issue with adults, though. Our kids are just as vulnerable to manipulation as we are.
America’s younger population has become increasingly involved in politics. Teenagers who are not even able to cast a ballot are exposed to political content online, much of which has become increasingly polarizing. Younger kids are already struggling to understand that the world is much more complex than “good guys versus bad guys.” Usually, it is the kids’ parents who teach them right from wrong to combat this. Nowadays, however, according to LSU political researchers Ayla Orden and Lance Porter, social media, where adult supervision is virtually nonexistent, is the primary channel through which teens learn about recent events.
Mom and Dad no longer feel comfortable teaching their kids about politics, and so the children turn to the next most accessible teachers: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. They create their opinions from what they observe online, and anyone who disagrees with them is objectively evil because that is what they see the adults saying.
Odin and Porter state that the “early formation of political identity” can result in a partisan view of the world, which in turn causes sentiments of violence to increase later in life.
The solution to this problem is painfully obvious: radical, violent rhetoric should be destroyed, and healthy discourse needs to be incentivized in its place.
In other words, the federal government needs to step in and implement common sense policies. For example, if you’re planning to kill a politician and are talking about it online, you should go to jail, and your content should be deleted. That’s not tyrannical at all. That’s just common sense.
We must regulate social media to the point where it is no longer a ground zero for violent killers and domestic terrorists, and is instead a safe space for its users to discuss politics in good faith. Unfortunately, we’ve just reached that point in this country where we need to start toeing the line between free speech and censorship, in order to prevent further loss of life.
It’s difficult to imagine that social media actually has an impact on real-life events. It has become so abstract in our minds that a part of us truly believes they are two “separate worlds.” But they’re not separate at all.
This fire will not stop on its own. If we do not stand up for our country and quell the flames of radicalism before they grow, they will turn our Republic to ash, and us with it.