Many people use social media to document the things we most enjoy in our lives, vacations, gourmet meals, or even the latest TikTok dance.

But it can also be used to influence people who want to seek better lives, often through dangerous journeys that can have tragic results.

This report was produced by the students in the Global Reporting Program

at the University of British Columbia and is narrated by Andrea Crosson.

These people are celebrating, celebrating making it to Europe, celebrating the end of a long journey

and they hope the beginning of new lives.

And for many, the first thing they do is reach for their phones to share their life-changing

news on apps like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

Yes, yes, like people talk about it on social media like Facebook and all that.

People are also on TikTok because it's what a lot of people use now.

24-year-old Sana de Silva is an amateur soccer player

who lives on the Spanish Canary Island of El Hiero.

He saw videos like these when he was living in Senegal,

hoping to someday make his way to Spain.

There are people on the journey who take video and show people that this path is fine and

that they're not afraid. That, no, it's not very dangerous, that any person can take this route.

But what he discovered was very different. The videos rarely show the reality of the journey on these overloaded, barely seaworthy boats,

where urine and diesel fuel slosh around passengers' feet, and violence is common.

When Sana da Silva made his decision to climb aboard, he had no idea he was embarking on what the UN calls

one of the most dangerous and deadliest migration routes in the world. For him, it turned

into a week-long nightmare.

I was throwing up. Everything I ate, I threw up. In the last three days, I didn't

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