Social Media Making Us Think

With the rapid growth of social media in recent years, it is truly unbelievable how fast some topics can spread once they have been shared on social media. Personally, whenever I hear anything about a current event, I search my Twitter page about it before I think to turn on the news or ask my peers if they know any information about what is going on. I think that this is both a good and bad thing for the world. On one hand, I think it is great that information is very accessible to a large amount of people and there are great opportunities to inform people on issues that they may have never known anything about.On the other hand, it is very easy to share non-credible information that might alter the opinions someone has about a certain issue.

As the year 2014 comes to a close (can you even believe its already over?!), think back and reflect on all of the times current events and issues have flooded your news feeds on Facebook, Twitter, etc. From the ALS ice bucket challenge, to the debates about Ferguson, social media has created a place where people can share and spread their opinions with others. In an article I found on E!, they rounded up fifteen different instances where social media posts or advertisements really made us stop and think about the issues at hand. While some of them are extremely controversial and sensitive topics, or some lighthearted and funny, they really made us stop while we were scrolling through the newsfeed and really think about what we were seeing.

Here are some examples:

Ebola sparked an uproar of fear in the United States after there were some cases of people entering the United States with Ebola. Without even learning more about what the disease is, people just got scared. While they had the right to be safe and concerned on the issue, many people created stereotypes for Africans assuming that they all were walking around with Ebola. The movement of #IamLiberianNotAVirus started when a woman was being judged by her race of having Ebola when she was not infected with the disease. This photo was shared on Facebook, and it immediately went viral. It taught us to educate ourselves before jumping to conclusions about people.

When a video was released of NFL player Ray Rice physically abusing his wife, it caused an uproar on the issue of domestic violence. This ad on social media really stuck out to me because of how graphic it is. It is a visual representation of how many women who are abused both physically, verbally, emotionally, feel on the inside every day. There were many arguments on how Ray Rice should be punished by being suspended from the NFL. Sometimes, it takes a graphic image like this to make people stop and think.

Check out some more examples of how social media made us stop and think at: http://www.eonline.com/news/603760/15-times-social-media-made-us-think-in-2014