sit up in bed on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 28, and grab my phone. My fingers instinctively find Instagram: Face ID, swipe right, halfway down on the left. Clicking past my perfunctory self-imposed screen time limit (which I must’ve exceeded the previous night), I open the app and begin scrolling aimlessly down my feed.

The first post to attract my attention comes courtesy of @thatguysjokes. As an avid English soccer fan, I’ve found it a bountiful source of humorous, soccer-related memes since I started following in 2022. I expect much of the same as I scroll to a photo of Gary Neville, a famous ex-player and current pundit, wearing a graphic sweater and an expression of exaggerated horror. I read the text above his head: “Not even 3 months into 2026 and the FIFA peace prize winner has kidnapped the Venezuelan president, killed the leader of a cartel and bombed Iran.”

And that’s how I found out the United States bombed Iran.

***

Until recently, I’ve considered myself a fairly responsible news consumer — as much as one can be in a 21st century media landscape dominated by social media. I follow the media mainstays on Instagram — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. I follow the BBC, the Economist and Al Jazeera to keep up with international affairs. I even check my biases through accounts like Ground News, which shows the skew of reported topics in its delivery. I’ve attempted to clearly delineate reputable sources of reporting from any entertainment I get from the platform.

In recent months, however, I’ve noticed a shift in the accounts from which I’m exposed to news. The change isn’t in my following, nor my online behavior. But now, instead of the Times, Al Jazeera, or Ground News, I first learn about world happenings from humor accounts like @thatguysjokes, @nflmemes_ig, @the_political_compass, or any number of the hundreds of other humor accounts on Instagram.

On social media, desensitization – the process of people becoming emotionally callous – is nothing new. Just last month, the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote “This Is What It Looks Like When Nothing Matters,” an article attacking what he called the internet’s “nihilism crisis.” Crass memes, posted by the president as well as everyday netizens, are normalized and have been for a long time.

What’s changed recently is the process by which desensitization has occurred. Humor accounts have adopted real-life events, often tragedies, as fodder to make ever-more ‘relevant’ jokes, the butt of which is often seriousness itself. Now, not only are we desensitized by interacting with media online, we are interacting with media that is itself desensitized.

Take the post I saw that morning. Its content — President Trump’s role in the Iranian bombings — is breaking news. Instead of taking the bombings as an important global event, though, humor is added. Before I consciously absorb any information, the visual appearance of a meme conditions me to understand the incoming content as a joke. Pairing informative, if subjective, words with Gary Neville’s comical, but unrelated, expression washes out any seriousness that might have been left — the meme is devoid of genuine feeling.

The previous Monday, I learned about the Mexican government’s killing of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes through another @thatguysjokes post. One of my best friends from high school sent me the fifth slide, a meme that read: “Me wearing my Ochoa Mexico shirt to the World Cup so the cartel know that I’m one of the good gringos.” When I saw it, I smiled. Maybe it was the niche soccer reference. Maybe it was the concept of my being a “good gringo.” Either way, I hearted his message and forwarded it to another friend.

Other accounts post similarly. On March 1, @the_political_compass posted a 15-slide collection of memes centered around the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The second slide is a grainy screenshot of a text conversation: someone whose profile picture is the Iranian flag says “we’re short staffed for tonight,” while two other texters bearing Russian and Chinese flags wish Iran good luck. As of March 5, the post had 81,900 likes and 82,000 shares.

A March 4 post from @nflmemes_ig used an injury graphic — parodying those used by ESPN and the official National Football League account — to announce the supreme leader’s death. Next to a rather unflattering portrait of Khamenei, the graphic read “Out indefinitely [tomahawk missile].” After 48 hours, the post had 69,500 likes and 65,000 shares.

I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, saw these posts, received information from them, and, yes, found some small, perverse, enjoyment. Not until last week did I first wonder when the Times had last broken a story I hadn’t first seen elsewhere, or consider what my reaction might say about social media platforms, society, or myself.

People, especially young people, are already desensitized from social media. Since the 1970s, we’ve known that the more time individuals spent watching violent media depictions, the less emotionally responsive they became to violent stimuli. The National Institute of Health published an August 2023 study with the key discovery of “a connection between social media use and adolescent depression.” A month ago, the Washington Post published an article about nihilistic violent extremism, a new term used by federal prosecutors working on cases where “attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization” – a realization of Warzel’s online nihilism crisis. Moreover, these are conservative estimates. A definitive longitudinal study into the desensitizing effects of social media on mental health has yet to be published. The true impact may be worse.

But, acknowledging the drastic consequences of this process, it has been and is still occurring. Why does this new desensitized media merit special scrutiny?

In my eyes, it’s because we can no longer realistically avoid it. The two @thatguysjokes posts — Gary Neville and “good gringos” — had a combined 243,000 likes and 162,900 shares as of March 5. The Times — the largest, most followed print media corporation in the world — got just 138,000 likes and 48,700 thousand shares on its two breaking news posts for the Iran bombings and cartel violence. Despite having a ninth of the followers of the Times, @thatguysjokes is, in this space, more ubiquitous.

If I wanted to avoid this humor news, could I completely renounce any entertainment for entertainment’s sake on social media? Maybe, but that space is largely what makes social media enjoyable — I don’t want to reckon with the social and cultural consequences of that. Even if I did, the virality of these humor pages doesn’t guarantee I could avoid them, even if I wanted to.

As a result, the sanctity of seriousness has vanished along with the barrier between news and humor. Earnestness is now a luxury, not to mention cringy. If everything is satire, satire becomes the only way in which one can understand true, real-world events.

The Iranian missile strikes don’t matter because of the 1,300 dead in Tehran or the six U.S. servicemen and women who’ve died in Kuwait. The killing of “El Mencho” doesn’t matter because of the 70 deaths thereafter or widespread street violence. They matter, they are important, they are meaningful because…

They’re not.

Nowhere is this disaffection more evident than in comments sections. Ostensibly a space where users can engage, any meaningful engagement is simply further subversion. One of the most liked comments under the first @thatguysjokes post I saw read: “Three of the best he’s made them pay and that completes a wonderful hattrick.” One under the @thatguysjokes cartel post read: “When have I ever criticised churros and burritos?” As Warzel writes, “A kind of post-ironic fatalism that was once endemic to seedy message boards has bled into the broader culture, changing how people communicate. Nihilism is now the lingua franca of the internet.” Amen to that.

***

The week after I woke up to the Iran post, I’m sitting in my common room trying to write the conclusion to this inquiry. A couple guys from my entryway sprawl out on the couch and desk chairs, half-watching a basketball game while idly scrolling reels. They’re talking basketball shop, debating the merits of last year’s NBA finals between the Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder. One of them taps my roommate and me on the shoulder, proffering his phone. “This is one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen,” he says. We lean in to watch.

The clip is of President Bill Clinton, speaking in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 168 people died, and it remains the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Clinton begins, “The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, the voice is obviously AI-generated: “and it was carried out by that big bald f***ing bastard Tyrese Haliburton.”

I look at the account: @memerunnergpt. I look at the caption: “Tyrese Haliburton took responsibility for an act of terror in Oklahoma City last night. The leader of the Haliban drained a last second jumper to defeat the OKC Thunder in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. (Parody).” I look at the comments: laughing while crying emojis, fire emojis, and unequivocal praise — “This might be your best work yet brother.”

Smiling at us, the guy in my entryway takes his phone back and swipes to the next reel.

—Magazine writer Wyatt J. Meyer can be reached at [email protected].