The Role of Social Media

In the book Accountable by Dashka Slater, In Albany California and happened in 2017. In the book, there was this group of boys where they would post on this Instagram account but it got taken way too far, at first they were just posting to be funny but it escalated and started to become a racist Instagram account about real people in their school. Social media played a huge part in that Instagram account and played a role in exacerbating it and exposing it to the world. Social media exacerbated the racist incident by spreading it around the world, bringing attention to the incident, and causing long term consequences to everyone involved and social media also should bear some responsibility since they aren’t the people that are posting it but also they should take precautions.

One way social media exaggerate and exposed the racist incident is by spreading it around the world for other people to make aware of it and bring attention to the incident. First, A news channel was talking about the racist incident that occurred in Albany when the situation was at the peak of its elaboration which caused the incident not to be known to just locals, but people around the world as well. “On Wednesday night, a story about the Instagram account ran on the evening news. It featured Billie’s mother. The mother of a student at Albany High School is speaking out tonight about racially offensive pictures that targeted her daughter and others at the school,” pg 149. This quote shows that the racist Instagram account grew out of proportion so much that a news outlet addressed it, which eventually ended up spreading the situation around the world, meaning that now the people that are involved would be known and connected to the incident around my world. This is important to the book because it also showed how big the situation was being blown up on and it grew out of proportion with the help of social media. Also by making the situation bigger on social media, the people that were involved felt a sense of unsafe since now everyone on social media was talking about it. “Tiana took it to Twitter. She posted a 27-tweet thread about her experience in Albany: How the @CityofAlbanyCA and @albanypolice dropped the ball and allowed me and my friends to be bullied and excluded.” pg 150. This quote proves my thesis because by that tweet that Tiana had made onto twitter, social media exacerbated it to the point where people outside of Albany knew about it and eventually exposed the people involved, victims and perpetrators. Which made the situation way bigger and caused it to become such a big mess throughout the book. Social media exposes the racist incident by not taking action and letting the algorithm in apps boost and recommend the posts to others to see which attracted more attention to the incident.

After that, Social media should have to carry responsibility for the spread of hate speech and misinformation but also the people that are creating the posts because the people that are liking that type of content, and that are creating it should bear the responsibility but social media also profit off of that type of content by boosting it which should also carry consequences. In these social media apps, there are unofficial rules that users follow that have become normalized too and liking posts that may or may not be interesting to them is one of them, which can be a sign of respect but some people don't perceive it as that. “The more you interact with an account, the more you're likely to see it in the future. It’s possible to follow an account but never see it in the future. Those are the algorithm choices, not yours.” pg 43. In this quote, it explains how the algorithm of these social media apps recommend pieces of content to show you, and you do not control those choices or posts that pop up on your feed. But what you like, or who you follow can determine what type of content is being shown to you. For Charles's friends, they liked the racist Instagram posts which ended up showing up in their feed more often since the algorithm knows that they’ve been liking those types of posts. Which shows that social media should be responsible for spreading out the messages that they have posted since it isn’t in their control. “Outrage, shame, envy, hate-all of it earns money for social media companies and provides them with useful information. The more those companies learn about people's allegiances, the more precisely they can target them with ads.” pg 431. This quote also shows how social media and many companies profit from what people post and instead of deleting posts that are negative and that have a lot of attention, they will just boost it and put it on other people’s algorithm so that they can profit more from it and boost its attention. Social Media shouldn't carry most of the responsibility for the spread of misinformation and hate speech because they aren’t posting the hate speech or misinformation, but they should carry some responsibility for boosting and profiting from those types of posts that clearly shouldn’t be boosted and profited off of. 

Social media exposed and exacerbated the racist incident by bringing attention to the incident, social media should take some accountability when it comes to spreading misinformation and hate speech. Social media exaggerated and exposed the situation by bringing it on social media in the first place and by boosting the posts if they are getting enough views. If a racist Instagram account was created and got a lot of attention and was created by a student in San Rafael High School, I think it would be a big situation that will eventually get resolved because our school takes these types of situations very seriously and will take the necessary steps to make sure SRHS is a safe place for every student. SRHS would try to find out who made the account and posted on it and give them the necessary consequences based on what they posted but also if it was on school grounds and they would try to protect the victims as best as they possibly can. Unlike the beginning of the book when some people were made aware that the account would keep quiet and not report this, I think in SRHS this would immediately get reported and handled at the very beginning and taken very seriously as well. Some lessons that can be learned from these books is to be mindful and to think if what you are going to post is something that is okay to post and not something that would hurt other people or yourself. If this situation were to happen, something SRHS could do than Albany High School would be to take precautions and be aware of what is being posted on social media on school grounds or to believe and support even an accusation of a Instagram account being racist seriously from the beginning to support the victims and to take the rights steps from the beginning.