Social mediaSocial media gives a set of tools for, movement building and reframing and framing, organizing, and efforts to making a change in popular culture, education and interrupt cultural racism or to transform. As any tool, social media has pros and cons for racial equity work. On the plus side, the chance exists for people who like the communication or message to send it out to the networks, thus “multiplying” its reach and perhaps connecting organizations with useful and new networks. On the negative side, as with numerous of media channels, it is difficult to control those who see or do not see the news or any information, particularly as it is being multiplied. Also, as everyone has seen many times, the anonymity of social media seems to invite a great deal of hate speech. There is some research also points out that social networking is better at connecting with and entertaining people than at motivating them to act, and particularly, to take sustained action. So we can see these days a many people are using social media in their racial equity work.
Thus my thought that I would share on the first blog will be that social media has become an easy catalyst for the spread of racism and hate such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and the saturation of our daily lives by the media that have made a lot of hate speech more pervasive and ubiquitous than ever before. Various of people are met with racist, homophobic, anti-Ziganism, xenophobic and anti-Muslim hate online regardless of their will to engage in such discussion. The low threshold of an entrance of online forums, anonymity and, comment sections of news portals and social media sites provide fertile soil for cyber hate.
Hence, cyber hate is burgeoning and becoming more and more violent, offensive and intrusive. For example, The Caucasian female rapper denied posting Tweets in 2012 that said, “Sometimes I wish slavery was still goin’ on” and “I don’t need black fans anyway. Y’all don’t buy albums.” Kreayshawn said her Twitter was hacked and sent out the half-hearted (and still offensive) apology the following morning, “I am sorry, I LOVE FRIED CHICKEN! So in social media, not only big companies that exploit celebrities and their big numbers of followers for business or products advertisement, but also there is the racial hacker can exploitation of celebrities in the media to catalyst the racism, classism, sexism, or heterosexism.
