Workshop on harmful social media trends

On 27 November 2025, the class E2 went to Zitadelle Spandau for a workshop on social media trends and how they can be harmful.

The workshop started with a short tour of the exhibition “Enthüllt. Berlin und seine Denkmäler” and the video sculpture “Bereitschaft” by Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier. The latter deals with an extreme desire of men to look perfect, misogyny, the influence of extremism and how all of this is portrayed on TikTok.

In the workshop we were put in five groups which discussed different social media topics (trivialization of the holocaust, meme culture, political appropriation of famous people, use of symbols/emojis, body trends) using plenty of pictures. They seemed harmless at first but have an underlying meaning/message that is dangerous or harmful.

The groups had to arrange the images in a graph with the criteria normie, red-pilled, violence and humour. Whenever we didn’t know how to properly sort the pictures, we could use a poster which explained most of them. At the end, the groups picked one or two photos and explained their meaning and spot in the graph to the class.

Overall, the experience made us aware of dangerous opinions on social media and will help us identify them more easily in the future.

Text and photos: N. Csink