Accountable Essay

Danny Martinez

Ms.Oseguera

AVID 10

12 December, 2024

Accountable by Dashka Slater is a true-life story about a high school that quickly turns into a place of continuous conflict and fights due to racism on social media. In 2017, an Instagram account started posting racist memes of students, and making the whole school worried that they would be next. Social media both exacerbates and exposes the racist incident at Albany High School because it is popular amongst young people. Social media should bear some responsibility for spreading hate speech. Social media can cause an entire high school to collapse because its guidelines do not mention limiting hate speech.

Instagram, a social media platform, both escalated and exposed the racist incident in Albany High School. Instagram is a popular platform that young people use to post whatever they want. In the book, all the students use this social media platform. In fact, the author included a section explaining the rules of this platform: “In April 2017, Instagram was reporting 700 million active users…By 2018, Instagram had earmarked most of its $390 million marketing budget for attracting and retaining teenage users”(43). This is highly significant and supports my claim because it demonstrates how Instagram generates most of its revenue from teen users. This is one of many popular social media platforms for youth to post whatever they want. Another example of how social media both escalated and exposed the racist incident in Albany High School is that the students chose to use Instagram to post racist posts about classmates, exposing the students' true intent. For example, Andrea was one day at a class when Greg touched her. She didn’t think of it as much, but seeing the post on Greg’s spam account brought Andrea discomfort. After deleting another post in Greg’s Spam account, she learned the names of those it could have been that included her name. “Don’t post anything else,’ she told him. ‘We are not cool. Don’t talk about me... The feeling that every inch of her was being assessed, analyzed, judged, and then dismissed as unworthy. It made it hard to go to school.”(58). This is another clear example of why the students in Albany High chose to post about Andrea's hair. They named her and poked fun at her. It ultimately exposed what the students wanted to do, which was just to have fun. But they didn’t do it in the right way.

Instagram should bear some responsibility for the outbreak of Albany High because it does not limit posts involving hate speech or racism. This commotion brought some attention. Two girls wrote about what they remembered, and what they wrote was surprising: “Private Instagram account of disgusting racist images about colored people and women…”(61). This is just a small amount of what these two girls wrote. It continued to bring up more hate speech, body shaming, and multiple racist comments about people both girls knew. This shows how none of these racist posts were deleted by Instagram or even banned by the account itself. And it’s not only just Instagram, but overall some others. The chapter “Nothing’s Going To Happen” explains how teenagers choose to use social media and have no limit to what they can do. “In 2012, a group of junior and senior boys set up a competition to see who could have sex with the most ninth- and tenth-grade girls, keeping score on Twitter. In 2015, a group of twelfth-graders created an account on Instagram they called Broke Boys, where they posted degrading pictures of female classmates”(62). This is how not just Albany High is doing this, but also teenagers and people around the world. They have no limit to what they can do positively or negatively.

Social media should be something that all people care about and use fairly. The example that happened in Albany High, which exposed the racist intent, showed that the platform has no limits or consequences. Social media platforms should bear some responsibility for the spread of hate speech because they cause people to be uncomfortable. Some affected people might make wrong choices in their lives. If something like this were to happen in SR, I would expect the platform to take action first and then involve the students who made the post before it gets more complicated. So the moral of this lesson is that people choose to do things because they can. They may be positive or negative or right or wrong. But in the end, it’s in people's hands to choose what they want to do.