The deliberation I attended was titled “Who Owns Your Voice?” and covered the moderation of posts on social media sites.  I thought they did an excellent job at giving the backstory to free speech and its limits, including famous court cases like Schneck vs United States.  They also described the moderation policies of social media platforms like Instagram and Youtube which provided us participants with a good base to found our arguments on.  I also enjoyed how they put the definition of deliberation in their issue guide as those who had not taken RCL were most likely unfamiliar with the word.  When we got into the actual approaches, it seemed that one and three were the major favorites as the idea of the government patrolling social media sites seemed unrealistic.  I thought the approach teams did a great job outlining the benefits and downfalls of their approaches and being fair to the other teams.  I feel that sometimes the conversation did slow down quite a bit and they needed more questions to try and spark up more speakers as the conversation seemed to be revolving around a certain few people, an issue my group struggled with.  I was a big advocate for the third approach and mainly argued that there was no way for either companies or the government to silence every bad comment and that people can always find loopholes in their systems.  I believed the best solution is to let these apps run on their own and give users, people who will be affected by these harmful comments, the ability to report them themselves.  In the end, the community is the most integral part of any social media service and the decisions should be left to them.  Someone who argued for approach one did make a good point about how many times people are too apathetic to report these negative comments and they can end up hurting the people who do care.  I saw their point of view that people should be able to feel safe online without having to worry about being bullied or harassed, even for a short while before the comment is reported.  This made me more sympathetic to the idea of company regulation, but in the end I left sticking to the idea that the best system is one that is left to run by its own laws.

For our advocacy project, we will be trying to combat mental illness and lack of productivity in Penn State students due to frequent phone use.  We believe, based on new medical research being released as well as personal experience, that college students have the poor habit of spending hours a day on their phone.  We believe these hours could be better spent with more productive and rewarding activities like studying, exercise, or any activity more enjoyable then scrolling through a phone.  This is why we have taken the approach of encouraging students to set limits on their screen time using a recently introduced smartphone feature.  We know that appealing to students through the idea of increasing productivity and making them realize how much time they save will be effective.  However, we want our whole campaign to be backed on the idea of preserving the mental health of the younger generations, so I believe it will be a good idea to partner with Aevidum.  Aevidum is an education based mental health awareness campaign that encourages students from elementary school all the way to college to have each other’s back and lend an ear.  They have the goal of raising awareness within school communities for diseases that aren’t often talked about and they want to prevent as many of these cases as possible.  Since our advocacy project has the same central goals, I believe it would be beneficial to partner with them.  We could provide them with a new focus in trying to protect young kids and teens from the harmful effects of social media, and they could successfully spread our message over 150 schools across the country and raise awareness in the young population.  I believe the symphony of our idea with the popularity and strong message delivered by Aevidium will be a mutually beneficial partnership.

Our advocacy project tackled the sensitive but protruding issue of debilitating social media and overall phone usage time in the Penn State population. After doing significant research for my own benefit as well as my issue brief, I noticed a relationship between the increased phone time spent by our generation and rising rates of mental illness like generalized anxiety and depression in millennials and generation Z.  Mental health is something that has significantly affected both of us throughout our lives, and we wanted to do all we could to stop this increasing trend and preserve the happiness of the upcoming and current college generations.  We quickly became passionate about making a change.

Although we first thought about using government as a means of implementing change, we quickly realized that we could make a much swifter and significant impact by simply presenting our peers with undeniable facts which would cause them to self-reflect and make the changes in their own lives by using tools already at their disposal. Brainstorming solutions was difficult because phones have become an absolute necessity in our society today, and no one would find it reasonable to completely give them up or disconnect from most social media. This meant that villainizing social media or bluntly asking students to delete their social media were not realistic options.

 We ourselves struggle with wasting precious time on social media and we needed to relate to other students by giving them a more moderate option. This led us to Apple’s newly added screen time feature. This setting, recently introduced by Apple, gives users the ability to set a limit on the amount of time they can spend on a specific category of apps like social media or entertainment. After some brief research, we found that Android also offered a similar feature in their phones. Our goal now was to make students aware of this feature and give them a reason to limit their time every day.