Writers Blog #8

Over the last few weeks in class, we have spent a lot of time working on a pitch to a news outlet or publication about a social issue or topic that we care about.

I chose to write about incivility on social media. I am a frequent user of social media as of now you could consider social media “my life” as my course of study in college is Social Media and Digital Communications.

The main social media platform that I use is Instagram. In 2019, I created a theme page about my passion which has grown to over 55,000 thousand followers.

All fun and games right…? Not exactly. Over the past five years or so I have encountered a lot of cyberbullying on the app. In the last year, it has become much worse.

It started with arguments in the comment section of my own posts and from time to time they are still apparent. 2019 is when I realized that social media is not all fun in games.

On a different page, I scroll through ‘Instagram Reels’ and on almost every meme or reality video, there is some sort of bullying in the comments.

Unfortunately, these comments often contain racist and sexist remarks. Not cool. What frustrates me most is that people who comment these rude posts are doing it to be funny with a goal of receiving the most liked comment.

Many of these people are commenting these awful comments on accounts that do not contain any personal information about themselves, however, I have seen some people who have ‘no filter’ comment from accounts with their personal information.

This makes me think of how uneducated people are on managing their own social footprint. Imagine if you just applied for a job and they searched you up on social media and found out that you were participating in this act of cyberbullying on social media?

The main reason that I chose this topic over others is because it hits close to home just with the reason that I use social media a lot and it honestly bothers me each time I see these comments.

I know that there really is no solution to this issue, as these rude people have the ability to create new accounts, but it is important to do all that I can to create awareness about the issue with hope that it can influence some people to stop. One person that stops is one less person that gets bullied.

Another issue with cyberbullying on social media is that there are young kids on these social apps who are being exposed to such cruel words and meanings.

When I was a kid, I did not have the option to open a social media app and become exposed to various slurs and all the bullying that takes place on these apps that it does today.

Social media is not a safe place at all and it is important to create awareness on the issue.