March 17th, 2023: State Farm Stadium buzzes with excitement as I stand in the pit—front row—awaiting the opening number of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. The crowd is electric; my senses are sharp. It’s the very first show, and as the stopwatch on the jumbotron—blasting Applause by Lady Gaga—approaches zero, the screams around me become deafening. As I think back on this moment, the memory is vividly engraved in my mind: the sights, the sounds, the pit of excitement in my stomach. However, regardless of how hard I focus, I can’t quite recall a single scent, taste, or tactile sensation. Maybe this is solely due to my excitement—indeed, moments of high emotion are known to cloud the specifics of memory in hindsight—but then it dawns on me: I don’t remember the tactile sensations of that moment because the memory isn’t mine. In fact, on March 17th, I was never there at all.
These sights and sounds were merely experienced through the screen of my iPhone; any “memory” I might recall of this night is simply a regurgitation of the many clips and livestreams I witnessed not from Glendale, Arizona, but from the comfort of my own bedroom. Only two and a half years later, the notion that my memory might be altered already seems preposterous. But imagine if this “memory” occurred to me fifty, sixty, even seventy years down the line. In 2095, will my aged mind have the ability to discern between true memories and those constructed from high-quality, vivid social media posts—particularly in the case of something as inconsequential as a Taylor Swift concert? The immersive and constant nature of social media content challenges the traditional understanding of personal memory, and while the risk might not be immediate, it has the potential to create mass-scale confabulation and a fragmented sense of self.
Confabulation is the unintentional fabrication of memory. One who experiences confabulation expresses false memories not out of malice or deception but because it is truly their personal recounting of events. Take, for example, a story from your youth: maybe you were three. You have heard this memory repeated by older family members so often you have started to accept it as fact. You don’t really remember this story from your own experience—you were far too young, of course—but you’ve heard it so many times that your brain starts to fabricate a memory around it. You may even start to recall false perceptions and sensations of the event. This phenomenon is naturally occurring, especially later in life, but the prevalence of easily accessible, high-quality insights into others’ lives has unavoidable long-term consequences for the mind.
When it comes to confabulation as a result of social media, many point to the dangers of misinformation in terms of news, but I would argue that even posts not presented as fact or news have the potential to confuse the mind. Never before in history has the everyday person had unlimited access to the firsthand accounts of others’ daily lives. Never before have I been able to witness a stranger’s complete visual and auditory experience on a rollercoaster via GoPro or Meta AI Glasses. Naturally, in old age—when my recollection may become foggy—my brain will scramble to fill the gaps left behind by a lapse in memory: what stops it from pulling on that immersive rollercoaster memory, even if I’m not certain it’s my own?
While memory may not always be trusted as objective fact, it is central to one’s humanity. Enlightenment thinker John Locke posited the Memory Theory of Personal Identity, stating that memory and consciousness are what make up the human condition. Locke believed that identity and memory are intrinsically linked; a person’s identity only remains constant as they age because they are able to recall past thoughts and actions. If someone loses their ability to remember their past, they effectively become a different person, even if their physical form remains the same. This key principle underscores the unsettling reality of social-media-induced confabulation. Assuming Locke’s argument to be sound, the implication of confusing others’ experiences for your own goes beyond a trivial mix-up: it fundamentally alters your identity and sense of self.
Given this danger, is there an ethical responsibility placed on the content creator to avoid producing highly vivid or emotionally charged content? Does the responsibility instead fall on the consumer not to seek it out? Is there any practical way to avoid—or undo—the memory contamination already done? The answers to these questions are highly nuanced and convoluted, and while I admit to not possessing every explanation, I believe there is a certain level of freedom of expression that must be upheld on the creator’s end. I think that a large part of the responsibility falls on the consumer—not necessarily to avoid immersive content, but to be conscious of what they may be subjecting their mind to in the long term.
Other schools of thought may argue that the concept of confabulation shaped by social media is a non-issue; they may argue that our brains are naturally equipped to distinguish between firsthand and secondhand accounts, even if the distinction is subtle. The brain may tag these memories with a different source code. There is an inherent flaw in this rebuttal: it relies on the assumption that the brain’s source monitoring is foolproof. In reality, decades of psychological research demonstrate just how easily people misattribute the origins of their memories, confusing something they read, imagined, or watched with something they personally experienced. The precedent is already there, even without the immense influence of new-age social media output. The sheer personalization and humanity of visually documented firsthand accounts go beyond the influence of scripted television or words on a page: social media exhibits real-life experiences—experiences that you or I could realistically perceive in our own lives in a similar manner. How, given the extent of that sensory and emotional feedback, can one argue the brain can preserve clear source distinctions between “real” and “fake,” especially decades down the line?
Confabulation is a term little used by the general public, but the crux of its implications—especially in the case of social media—is astonishingly intuitive. In the end, the phenomenon of social-media-induced confabulation underscores just how fragile the boundary between lived reality and mediated experience truly is. What, then, makes a memory your own? Is it the raw sensory input of being there in the moment, or the emotional weight it leaves behind? If I can recall the sights and sounds of an Eras Tour opener with as much clarity as someone who stood in the pit that night, then in what sense is my recollection any less “mine”? Yet that question cuts to the core of why this matters: memory is not simply a collection of images and sounds but the scaffolding of selfhood, a thread that connects who we were to who we are becoming. If we begin to weave in the memories of others as though they were our own, we risk not just confusing fact with fiction but blurring the very boundaries of identity. Social media doesn’t just record our lives; it has the power to rework them.
By Josephine Nichols
Sept. 30th, 2025
Anamnesis 
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