Social Media: The Rise and Downfall of our Generation

Bridget Ward 

bw085717@ohio.edu

 

Social Media: the rise and downfall of our generation. Social media is powerful; it has a strong and wide outreach across our generation and it is so popular because people are so invested in it and find it to be both convenient and fun. Social media is used for a lot of different things, including personal matters, political matters, and the like. While social media has become one of, if not the most popular thing of our generation, especially during this pandemic, it has both positive and negative effects on society as a whole. 

People can say and post whatever they please from behind a screen, and many people do this, regardless of problems they may run into, such as defamation or community backlash. While it is nice to be able to post about and read other posts about things you are involved with or interested in, social media can be dangerous when it comes to societal issues. If someone is posting about an incident, there is probably going to be bias included, which in turn twists the story and misinforms anyone that sees the post. Regardless of where you are posting or what you are posting, posts on public platforms are PUBLIC and are seen by anyone who followers the person who posted. Therefore those that view this post can say or think whatever they want about it and in turn post how they feel or what they think. This can be dangerous because it can spark controversy and unnecessary arguments that could have easily been avoided. 

Picture source: Council for Foreign Relations

 

Hate speech is very frequently seen across all social media platforms, with some platforms experiencing more than others. Some platforms experience so much hate speech and disinformation on certain posts that they have to remove it from the site. The New York Times article titled "On Instagram, 11,696 Examples of How Hate Thrives on Social Media" states that "Social media companies have that identifying and removing hate speech and disinformation is difficult." They also stated that Facebook had to remove 96 percent of adult nudity and 99.5 percent of terrorist content. This is an issue that all social media platforms have to deal with because they have to deem what is appropriate for their site and what is not; they want to make sure that their users are seeing the content they want to see and not anything surprising or inappropriate. They also want to make sure that their users are not being misinformed because if they are, they are most likely going to switch to a site that correctly informs them of the information they are seeking. 

While people have the right to say and post whatever they want, according to the laws of free speech, these social media sites must regulate what can and can't be posted on their site, and they have the right to do that. This is a tough issue to run into as well because when people want to post something that is not within the regulations of the site, there is an issue of free speech and whether someone is allowed to censor another persons words. In many peoples eyes, denying users the ability to post whatever they want violates free speech rights, but at the same time, if this person is sharing a public post that may disturb other users, the owners are allowed to remove the post or restrict it from being posted because it is their business/site and they have the right to regulate what is posted. These social media companies could also risk larger amounts of trouble by letting anyone post anything because it is public and certain posts could disturb certain audiences that did not expect to come across vulgar posts. All in all, social media is public and sites have the right to regulate what is posted according to the posts appropriateness.