The Role of Social Media

Ms. Oseguera

AVID 10

10 December 2024

The Role of Social Media

In the book Accountable by Dashka Slater Social Media exposes the racist incident of Albany High School from 2017 because of how many teens have it and how easy it is to access and create these highly racist offensive posts.

Charles is an Asian student at Albany High School and he is known for making silly jokes that makes everyone giggle and laugh. All of this made people love Charles for his humor and personality which made Charles love the attention from everyone around. All of this made Charles want to make an instagram account aside from his main and spam account. This account revolved around him making highly racist posts of his peers that would later have major consequences. To illustrate, “Charles already had a spam account in addition to his main one, but Greg suggested he make a second one explicitly for this kind of edgier content” (Slater 40). This is significant because it shows how easy it is for a person to create an account where they can post explicit racist things and how people will slowly start to follow the account when it is known and how it would be easy for them to spread rumors about the account. This will cause the situation to become a much bigger problem than it already is which will later on bring more people into the situation. Another example of this is, “News of the account had spread like wildfire among the black girls and their close friends, now several people came to join them” (Slater 54). When rumors are spread about the account and the racist posts that are up then everyone gets encouraged and curious to request the account to see the posts which will cause even more rumors to spread all around the school. All of this will at one point reach the attention of the school's administrators which will cause a major problem for the student Charles under the account. In conclusion this shows how fast social media can expose the racist things going on under the account @yungcavage account.

As Charles made the @yungcavage account he rapidly started making highly offensive posts towards his peers and comparing them to something horrible for the giggles of others. Nothing was done about these posts like Instagram taking control over the posts by taking them down so the situation wouldn't have been as bad as it got. For example, “Stitching Ana’s post to an old fashioned engraving of a naked black man hanging from a tree while being beaten by a white man. He captioned it: ‘Do you really tho?’” (Slater 40). This shows how people will go out their way to post hateful disturbing pictures of others, comparing them to something offensive and racist. And how nothing was done about this even though many people saw it. Therefore there should be a strict rule on Instagram for posts that contain any sort of hateful posts. Another piece of evidence is, “ ‘they don’t like me.’ ‘They don’t like me because I'm black.’ She was one of the darkest skinned girls in the school” (Slater 55). This is important because it shows how these racist posts will affect another person's well being that was targeted towards them. And how nothing was done sooner about this because Instagram has no limit for posts no matter what it really is. Even if you do report the posts it is not likely that Instagram will take the time to review your report and take the post down. In conclusion this shows how Instagram should have stricter rules for posting things and how Instagram should have held some sort of responsibility in these disturbing awful posts towards another person.

Social Media as in Instagram exposes and magnifies the racist incident at Albany HIgh School regarding the student Charles. And how Instagram should have taken responsibility for the accident of all the racist posts that were up and when they were clearly captioned in a highly hateful way towards other students.