Social Media can be a great place to express your opinions, read others, and collaborate with people you have never even met to discuss literally anything you want. Former President Donald Trump had campaigned that the media is dishonest, and is creating a strong divide in this country. I agree with him slightly but also have my own take. Sure, the media can easily control what they want people to see, and what they think the narrative should be. I would find it hard to find anyone that truly believes fully in one media source or news company. It’s human nature to persuade and make people believe a certain thing. However, is social media an issue that needs to be addressed in this country?
I say no. Social Media is a platform that anyone with access to and can express a lie, truth, or anything they want to express. The amount of information readily available at every American’s fingertips is more information than any average American has ever been given access to. How is this a bad thing? The truth of the matter is, it isn’t. It is only a bad thing if you let it become harmful in your life. If you choose to only follow accounts about bad news, that’s all you will see. If you follow accounts about a sports team you don’t like, that’s all you will see. The information you choose to believe and choose to ignore is what shapes your views and values.
During this conversation, it was brought up that Social Media is the reason for the strong divide in this country and why we are not united. My response was that imagine you live in a small town in America anywhere from 1776 to around the 1950s. As a citizen of that small town, you are only given one medium to catch up on your political, social, business, etc views. That newspaper is your link to the outside world, to the rest of the country. At the same time, all of your neighbors, their neighbors, and everyone else who lives in that time is reading the same material. There is no variety in what people are given to believe. If there is no variety, there will be complete unity among the town, city, and maybe even state. If you want to talk about the medias control, the writer of articles in newspapers in the early stages of America had full power over what the news was going to say.
Social Media is good. It provides people an opportunity to create their own unique opinions. Anyone who tries to tell you is caused the biggest divide in American history, remind them we had a civil war a few years back.
I agree that people take social media far too seriously. It’s supposed to be a source of entertainment where the user can interact, but people place far too much importance on random interactions on the internet. I understand why people get sucked into the cycle especially during the pandemic, but it is easy to have a positive experience on social media by avoiding actively negative news and separating the internet from real life.
I would argue that social media is good if regulated appropriately. I have seen countless accounts and posts taken down for “violating” the extremely vague “community guidelines.” Even worse, I have seen things taken down when they are posted by one political side, but if it is on the other it is completely acceptable (I bet you can guess the phenomenon I am referring to). The solution to this problem is to either hold platforms accountable and to require them to administer fairly and transparently, or to revoke their Section 230 status.