Accountable

In the book Accountable by Dakasha Slater, published in 2023, the main idea of the story is that a racist social media account was discovered among students, and led to a drastic change in a lot of teenager’s lives because of the incident that happened in Albany High School. The account mostly affected specific people like african american. because they were the ones being targeted on the Instagram account, and the times the person was targeted did not even know that they were being posted on Instagram with a private account. Social Media exposed and exacerbated the racist incident because they did not do anything about the account until it became a big deal, they left the account and its posts online, and the account was discovered with racist posts.

A lot of people argue about racist posts on Instagram but Instagram can not really do anything except for reporting the account or deleting it which is the only thing they can do because they can not arrest the person for racist posts, but if you were to be racist in public then there is a probability of getting arrested which is fair as racism is inhumane. In the story, two girls snatched a boy’s phone which contained all the racist posts and they took the phone with them to the girl's bathroom which the boy could not enter. Once they reviewed the phone they saw all the racist posts and they went to report it to the principal. “One Asian girl, one white one, their heads bent over Eren’s phone. Kerry took pictures of the screen with her own phone as Rosie looked over her shoulder and scrolled through the posts on the account”(pg.66) The problem is that Instagram made it worse because they did not do anything like ban or delete the account. And another problem is Instagram can not arrest a person with racist posts unless a person is being racist in public areas like at school or out of school.

Instagram allowed the spread of racist media as they did not take any action to ban the account. A student made a private account that had a lot of posts that would be racial jokes about people on his private account. “After Charles made the account, he began adding posts, he’d make them during the week and then post them in batches. Afterward, he couldn’t really explain the logic he used to determine which posts went on which account because he certainly made racial jokes on his regular spam account, particularly Asain jokes”(pg,44). Instagram can not do anything about this problem because the student is posting on his private account and since it is a private account then no one can really see it unless the owner of the account accepts their request but still Instagram should give them restrictions to post stuff.

The spread of racist content is Instagram’s fault as they did not moderate the content being posted on their platform. Instagram should do some fixing on the app because people are just posting racist stuff. “The letters of the sign had been written in gold spray paint, but in the photo they looked brown, which explained the caption: Did he color in that sign with his skin color.” In the post someone said something bad about the poster because in the post it looked brown but in reality it was spray painted gold, and once they saw the post they did not really understand it but later it dawned on him because people were mocking him.

Social Media exposed and exacerbated the incident at Albany High School becasue of people who reported the account that was posting racial stuff. Yes, Social Media should bear some responsibility for the spread of hate and speech and misinformation because people should not be posting racist stuff and making racial jokes becuase that is inhumane. Instagram should really step it up and put restrictions on what people are gonna post because what people are doing nowadays are just bad stuff like posting people and making racial jokes. This affects a lot of people but mostly teenagers.