AVID 10 MLA Format Accountable

Johnny Calderon (The man with a dream of going home)

Ms. Oseguera 

AVID 10

12/5-19/24

A Social Conundrum

Have you ever made a racist joke? Most of you would have said no, but what about the times with your friends? Well, that happened to a group of high school boys in the small community of Albany, what started as questionable high school behavior with an inside joke social media account turned into a nationwide story of how a group of teen boys posted racist comments to their fellow classmates. In the book Accountable by Dashka Slater we read about an racist social media account that made headlines in news stations and how it affects the people involved. Accountable shows that social media is responsible for letting the spread of hate.  It helped exacerbate and expose the incident of the racist Instagram account that happened at Albany high.

Social media should bear responsibility because there are problematic accounts in Albany almost every couple of years. For example,  l “In 2012, a group of junior and senior boys set 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 Instagram they called Broke Boys where they posted degrading pictures of female classmates.” (Slater 62). The fact that social media companies like X and Instagram just allow accounts like these to go unnoticed until it was too late is a problem. The 2017 incident should have been an incentive for these  companies to start showing responsibility. A second reason of why social media should start to bear some responsibility is how if affected the people related to the racists Instagram account with how it lead to protest of student to harm the student related to the Instagram account like them chatting and putting their phones to their face and one getting a bloody nose from getting hit and surrounding a car that had one of the student who dad “window was down and people were throwing things into the car, pressing their signs and their phones against the other windows, kicking the tires, pelting it with trash”(Slater 236). All of this sounds like a riot instead of a protest all because a social media company allows a racist account to keep posting instead of just banning it. These are just some examples of why social media companies should take responsibility and how they should start now so we can prevent situations like the 2017 Instagram account from happening again.

Additional Social media exacerbate and expose of the incident in Albany high only made the situation worse for all the parties involved. A prime example of how social media companies over complicate situations was when a superintendent shared that they were “‘Investigating a report of a rope that looked like a noose tied to a tree in the part next to the school’” (Slater 204). This then led to conflict between the boys, the targets to get in conflict of if their racist account made that noose appear, which lead to everything getting railed up for it to be revealed that it was just a group of scout kids trying to learn how to tie a knot. All of this additional confusion all because someone in social media saw a knot and thought it was a noose that was supporting the racist Instagram account. A another example of how Social media companies exacerbate the incident Albany high is how it affect the students mentally with the targets of the racist account needing to focus on school but  decide to skip because of much the social media account affect them, the other party had to move to other school or even be home-schooled to avoid verbal, and/or physical attacks and one of the boys had “[a] knife. Nobody was home. He knew what he needed to do: Get in the bathtub. Open the vein. He looked at himself in the mirror.”(Slater 246) Thankfully he stopped himself when some asked if he was there. Which made him think how selfish he would be to kill himself, ruining the lives of his family. This all because of a series of events that just kept escalating all thanks to social media.

In conclusion the story that is presented in Accountable shows that social media is responsible for letting the spread of hate and how it helped exacerbate the incident of the racist Instagram account that happened at Albany high. What can we do at SR?