Social media websites have provided us as a society with many different opportunities such as; reconnecting/staying in touch with old friends, meeting new people, exchanging ideas, and sharing content. Social media has however taken over many lives in this society as people have began to rely heavily on it as a source of income as a result of them false advertising products/companies for revenue in return, a platform to seek validation from strangers, and to also possibly be brainwashed by the many advertisements and propaganda being blasted to force people to pick one side over another in cases such as politics. This can be shown through the article “Who Will Take Responsibility For FaceBook,” as news broke that “the company admitted it had received payments for ads placed by organizations ‘likely operated out of Russia.’ These were troll operations with a wide range of phony ads designed to fan the flames of American racism, anti-LGBT sentiment, and fervor for guns—as well as to build opposition to Clinton.” It shows how dangerous social media sites can become when people with negative intentions come onto these sites and brainwash millions of people across the world to believe in and support evil ideas such as racism and pro-gun laws. A seemingly innocent person can join a site with their own positive ideas and suddenly end up being thrown into a cult of people who have strong beliefs about things that surely won’t make American great again. We can’t be blamed though because we have no choice but to see these corrupt advertisements as people such as the CEO of Facebook have instead decided to deny and claim innocence in the cycle of corruption instead of developing a solution to try to wipe out these sources of immorality. YouTube is another site that began as an open community for people across the world to create content in the form of videos and post for millions of people to see. However, many sites have claimed to be open and diverse but when you take a look at the people who receive the most subscribers/followers, likes, and comments, they are not racially diversed. In “Taking the You Out of YouTube,” McMuria states that a glance at the top 100 rated, viewed and disused videos, and most subscribed channels reveals far less racial diversity than broadcast network television. Most were US uploads with some non-US sports and Japanese popular culture.” This supports the idea that many of these social media sites falsely use the ideas of equality and that they are open to all in order to attract more people to join their sites, not because they actually promote openness across their website. It was also interesting that Jenkins stated that “perhaps we might think about the difference between what it means to be a YouTube community and what it would take to use the YouTube video sharing technologies to help expand the movement for racial and economic justice.” There are many corrupt and evil events currently occurring all over the world, but instead of people uniting over social media to try and erupt some form of change and to spread love, we are instead using these sites to further separate each other, argue, and spread more hate/injustice. We tend to focus more on trying to prove to strangers on the internet that we are “living our best lives” by bragging about all of the materialistic things we have and the amount of clout/attention that we are gaining. Andrew Bosworth, an outspoken Facebook executive, said “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.” I very much agree with this because we never stop to think about how dishonest, manipulative, and corrupt social media sites are in reality. We focus only on the good of them and as long as we get what we want out of the sites, we don’t care about the possibility of them negatively affecting our lives.
Jan 31