(As Featured on Business101.com)
“James Taylor has checked into Standing Rock Indian Reservation”. This past week, my newsfeed overflowed with friends checking in to Standing Rock Indian Reservation, in support of the Standing Rock Sioux, their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and an unsubstantiated possibility that the police were using Facebook geotagging to corner protestors at the site. The news spread like wildfire across the platform, and users were encouraged to check in, in solidarity, and to confuse police (who if they wanted to monitor activists would likely be able to do so by IP address rather than social media geotagging, but no matter). Regardless, 1.4 million users checked in at the reservation. This act, in and of itself, debunks the myth that millennials are politically unaware, and that they do not care about current events. The fact that the DAPL campaign occurred despite the mainstream media’s rather muted coverage of the conflict for the last several months (until celebrities got involved, that is), is indicative of the fact that millennials are getting their news. They are just not getting it from cracking open the pages of the Wall Street Journal at the…
