Online social media, one of the greatest inventions in the internet era. On Twitter, Tumblr, Ins, Archive of our own, people exchange information at an amazing speed, stay connect with friends and family. And more importantly, as described by Jon Ronson, social media is the democratization of justice. When powerful people misuse their power and privilege, we judge them to speak out our opinions online. For example, if an actor flirts with a girl in a disrespectful way in a show, People could shame him, denounce his actions by post their thoughts on twitter.
However, with the rapid development of social media, more and more people are involved in these platforms, which means more and more eyes are on all the users of one platform. Under such circumstances, sometimes an unintentional joke can trigger a whole outrage and attack over the speaker. For example, Justine Sacco, a normal female, post a sentence on her twitter says that
[Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!]
Just this seemingly harmless joke, got her to become the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter, her name has been Googled 1,220,000 times. Her family, job, education history, and all other personal history has been forward back and forth online. People shame her as racist and wish she been “fired and raped.” Weeks later, she got kicked off from the company and basically, her life has been ruined by Twitter.
As described by Jon Ronson, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become more like the hanging judges. From these stories, I feel people should be more couscous about the power in their hands. As human beings enter the information society, it is easy to hurt people even from the opposite of the screen.
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I think that social media has create this whole phenomena known as cancel culture, I allows hundreds of thousands if not millions to spew hateful things at one people. Now It can be good because I allows us as a people to not give people power and control when they don’t have views that align with or moral views. However it can go to far to quick when people can start saying death threats anonymously because someone said something that they don’t agree with. However on this topic I believe that the benefits outweigh the costs on this, there are so many benefits to social media like the ability for news to spread almost instantly and without any media lens.