Social Media Ethics

Social media has totally revolutionized the way people share and broadcast ideas, information, and many other contents. From simple sharing of an individual's experience to a heavier influential movements like social movements that can potentially affect the behavior of others, social media gives the society a much faster way to communicate with a large size of potential audiences. We are able to rapidly reach those large amount of audiences in social media platform giants, say Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and expose them with things that can be informative or on the other extreme, sensitive to them. Although social media has given us the opportunity to be better off in many ways we interact with others, it is critically important to keep in mind that everything we share on those platforms are completely exposed to hundreds even millions of audiences worldwide.

With the rapidly rising number of social media users these days, the role of ethics has become a serious discussion. Being ethical on social media platforms plays a big role in creating a healthy online environment. However, when someone is being unethical about his/her own post on a social media site, he/she will pay the price. Here is an example of a posted video, containing racist rants, on YouTube that went viral just a year ago. The subject of the video is a UCLA student named Alexandra Wallace. The video contains several racist rants that she made up regarding Asian culture and some others. Her action triggered outrage from thousands of people throughout the online community, threatening her action. As a result, she was forced to get out from her own school due to security and privacy reasons. Although she submitted an apology in the end, the damage has been done and she suffers as a result of her own silly action.

Racism is one subject matter that I am most concerned about social media ethics. I have seen plenty of racist remarks on social media platforms, especially YouTube. There are a lot of video comments that contain racist remark which I think are pathetic. The fact that YouTube is a huge social media platform that has transformed the way people watch videos and interact with others does not diminish the possibility of users making racist remarks. I personally think that these days, people have made YouTube a medium to make racist comments, chants, and rants. This is sort of an unhealthy online environment. In fact, racism has never been good and will always stay that way. Therefore, we, as responsible individuals, need to create and support a healthy online community, especially on social media platforms like YouTube. With this, we will be able to enjoy any contents on this social media site that are to the interest of ours and also feel secure about making interactions with other users.

There is this one blog post that I found that I think provides an in-depth analysis on social media ethics. In his post, David McMillan points out several important points that he thinks people should be aware of before making any post on social media platforms. Here is the link to his blog post: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/how-to-ruin-your-life-in-14-minutes-or-why-we-need-a-serious-conversation-about-the-ethics-of-social-media/. I personally like his point that he calls the social media golden rule which is "post about others as you would have them post about you". This carries an influential meaning to readers about making any kind of posts on social media platforms. I think it is totally worth it to spend some time to read on his analysis and thoughts on social media ethics. It made me learn much more about how to be a more ethical social media users and I am sure others too.

There is one lesson that I want to point out for every single individual to pay attention to before exposing something the whole world can see; that is to always think first before posting anything up on social media platforms, no matter if it is a status update, a video, a comment, etc. Remember to always be positive on the posts you make.