“Canceled”

Social media can me such an awesome thing and many people enjoy it but it can also be a dark place where people literally will have their lives ripped apart. Don’t get me wrong, social media does have lots of positivity that is spread on it but there is also a lot of horribly rude and hurtful content being written as well. Social media can, to say the least, be made a much more compassionate place that is used for good rather than there being so much hate being spread around.

Public shaming, unfortunately takes place quite often on the internet and social media as it is the easiest way to spread information whether it’s true or not. In a ted talk given by Monica Lewinsky, she talks about how her life was turned upside down so quickly by information being spread so quickly because of the internet. In her speech she says, “What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide.” She then added how the judgment coming from everyone was very much enabled by the internet.

People will use the social media to attack others without having to actually face them and even worse with how quickly new can spread, the cyber shaming becomes public shaming. So many people end up seeing something posted by a person that maybe they shouldn’t have posted but didn’t really think about it or even worse they post something meaning it one way but it is taken to be understood as a completely different thing.

Unfortunately this was the case for Justine Sacco. In this article it talks about how Sacco was tweeting as she was boarding a plane, some things that she thought were sarcastic and funny and knew her friends who followed her would understand. Then, next thing she knows, after landing, her tweets had blown up and people were enraged. She meant the tweets one way and they were taken another. Sacco’s life was changed for the worse after that. People were commenting horrible things about her and sending hateful messages to her and it got so crazy that she couldn’t look at her phone without it having hate towards her on it. It also ruined her career because all you had to do was google her and the negativity followed her. In the article the author says “Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so.” The cruel comments hardly slowed down for her because social media rewarded people for being mean and hateful towards her for what she had said so it just kept on continuing.

Things can be twist and turned so easily by people simply using social media to do it. This was also the case for Aaron Calvin who wrote an article explaining what happened to him. The social media simply got to what he said and turned him into the “bad guy” before he could even say a word. He was accused of accusing a celebrity during an interview and then his own tweets, from when he was a teenager were used against him. Calvin says in his article, “I was made into a villain and a fool, a man who tried to “cancel” Carson King and in so doing got himself ‘canceled.’” Social media can be a very powerful and evil thing when we use it for to harm someone else’s life.

Social media can be a dangerous thing when it has the power to create public shaming so easily. People can make a simple mistake or be misunderstood so easily in a blink of an eye and their whole life becomes full of negativity and hate. There isn’t a simple solution to all of this but it does start with the social media user? Maybe, next time you’re about to comment something towards someone think about what you are saying and how it could affect them.