es008215@ohio.edu
In today's age of social media, we are ingesting information quicker than ever before. We can scroll through our social media platforms and view words, pictures and videos as they are instantly uploaded by people from all over the world.
The faster we are able to see this information, the faster people are able to form an opinion of what they see on social media. They can easily make a snap judgement on a person, photo and/or video.
***For the sake of privacy, I am changing the names of the people in this story.
In November, Jasmine, a college student, tweeted a video of Gabby, another college student, at a restaurant Jasmine was at after she overheard comments from Gabby, who was sitting at the table next to them, that she thought were offensive to her.
Gabby is half Japanese and she was sitting with her father who is black and married to Gabby's mom, who is Japanese. Gabby was outraged by jokes she heard Jasmine making so she decided to record Jasmine at the restaurant. Gabby tweeted multiple videos of the incident and tweeted an entire thread about how Jasmine was showing "blatant racism".
Gabby's social media flooded with comments from people all over twitter. Gabby's tweet got over 2000 retweets and over 4000 likes. Gabby also sent the video to the professors in Jasmine's school.
Jasmine received threats from people all over social media. She deleted all of her social media accounts and left Ohio University for a few days.
Jasmine obviously should not have made jokes that would be offensive to to another culture. There are stereotypes in all cultures and it is important that people reframe from using them because they are offensive to to those people.
But it is also important to remember how quickly social media can destroy a persons image. People are immediately judging posts they are seeing and forming opinions without questioning the whole story.
People all over Twitter do not even know Jasmine but they are quickly forming ugly opinions about her because of a social media post.
Social media is a great place for people to advocate for social action, but it is important to find the line between advocating for social change and just trying to ruin a girls life.
I am not saying that it was wrong for Gabby to call out Jasmine's actions at the restaurant on social media, but no one should intentionally go out of their way to attack someone.
As journalists, we need to remember when we are using live-streams, drones and virtual reality that audiences are viewing these video almost immediately. We must remember that as journalists we are the gate keepers to information and we decide what the public sees.
Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies explains why it is important to "pause before you post". Journalists must wait to get the full account of story before they post it all over social media.
Pausing before you post helps journalists to make a good ethical decision when deciding if the public should know certain information. Journalists should not be the only people pausing before they post.
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| Photo from: Pintrest |
According to The Wellesly News, everyone can act as a journalist today. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social sites everybody is able to post information for people to see all over the world.
People must remember when posting these messages, pictures and/or videos that everybody has access to them and that everyone will be swiftly to form an opinion. The public must also remember that many of these social media posts are one-sided and may not show the full story of a certain event. The quicker people post, the quicker people will judge.
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