Rubbish everywhere
My family lives in Volcano. At least once a week we drive to Hilo for errands, etc. This entails a drive each way of nearly an hour.
Since the pandemic, rubbish has accumulated along the highway significantly. However, recently the roadside rubbish has escalated to alarming levels.
It used to be worse near the transfer stations, and still is, but the entire 30 miles of the highway is now littered with everything you can think of. Furniture, full garbage bags, diapers, fast food containers — you name it. What has changed?
Hawaii County, please address this issue. Visitors, please live clean in Hawaii. Residents, please live clean in your own land.
This is the kind of filth and negligence common in true Third World countries, and it’s ruining our beautiful Hawaii nei.
Laura L. Buck
Volcano
Social media pitfalls
Do you ever wonder how many people in the world are on social media? According to statistics on the internet, about 59% of the world population use social media applications. These apps include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and many more.
Social media users spend around an average two hours every day. But with so many active users on social media, there also comes a huge problem: misinformation and bad influence.
There is a lot of news and information thrown around in social media. These can be from news outlets, celebrities, influencers and everyday people. Fake news is there to change people’s point of view on a subject and influence them to believe something that is not true.
According to MIT Sloan, the business school of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fake news on Twitter, one of the most popular social media apps, has 70% more retweets than actual truthful news. There will be major impacts on people’s lives because they live off news they heard, so they are going to do the wrong things and can spread this fake information like a wildfire.
Fake news can also lead to bad influences, especially when it comes from an influencer. Influencers have become something that can not be avoided and can influence people in a negative way, especially young kids and teens. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of 13- to 17-year-olds found that 45% are online almost constantly, and 97% use a social media platform. This means that a high amount of teens will encounter influencers when scrolling through social media.
These bad influencers can influence them to behave in a way that is not healthy and can also be morally wrong. Remember, the majority of influencers are just chasing clout and have no intentions to accurately inform social media users.
As an avid social media user myself, I ran across bad influencers and multiple posts that misinform people. It is especially disappointing when my fellow peers fall into these traps that these posts lay down. It is always frustrating whenever my friends share posts or talk about things they saw on social media that are proven completely false. They don’t know that they’ve been given fake news, and they believed it just because it was on a post.
Stopping these fake news and bad influencers is nearly impossible, but bringing more awareness to it isn’t. We need to help people be more aware that not everything you see on the internet is true and trustworthy. Check if they are a reliable source … do your own research, and make sure to report any accounts that are spreading fake news.
We can’t stop the problem, but you can protect yourself and others from it.
Nga Hoang
Hilo High School student
