The news is the best way to find out what’s going on around you. It will warn you about the car accident on the major road you take to school or work (making everyone at least 15 minutes late), or what’s going on in Syria. Since the news hardly covers anything positive, people tend to not want to read it. Instead, most choose to believe what’s trending on twitter.

Social media is constantly letting us know what’s going on around the world, which takes away from picking up a newspaper or even reading stories on a news app. However, this poses a huge problem of: You can’t believe everything you’ve read on social media.

“Social media people make up stories and it spreads a lot easier,” sophomore Zach Garrett said. “People actually believe it.”

Platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr and even Snapchat give us a lot to talk about and share with others. Twitter has memories, which give us the top trending tags/stories. Since Twitter creates these stories based off of what’s trending, they aren’t necessarily true; these stories are simply used to fuel the trending tag. Sophomore Bryce Hoff tells of one such story.

“Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson committed suicide with a hair dryer in the bathtub,” Hoff said.

Although it proved to be a wildly popular trending story, the article was later proven to be a hoax. But it doesn’t end there.

“Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller died in a car crash,” Garrett said.

These are some of the few stories that can be made up by anyone on social media. There are many more, ranging from Donald Trump being shot to the world ending on October 29th.

There’s always risk in believing everything you see on social media. So get savvy and learn to develop your news judgement.