Ryan Sjoberg

Composition 101/12

Lora Strey

10 December 2014

Social Media’s Racial Influence

            Throughout social media’s brief history, it has had many influences on us in all aspects of our life.  It has impacted us on what we think about politics, sports, and race.  Sciencedirect.com recently looked into a correlation between frequent Facebook users and their willingness to accept messages from strangers.  The messages they received from these people tended to be extremely racist and rude.  Hate groups and their members often capitalize on social medial because it connects them to people they generally would never have connected with.  This gives them the opportunity to grow their organization and influence other people to believe their racist ways.  People may ask “Well what can we do on social media to stop the racism?”  It’s not all that easy, but things can be done.  First, people can flag or report people who say racist things to try and get them off the social sites for good and second racist slurs are monitored by some sites and taken down immediately if they are used in any context.  Also, there is a young PhD student in the U.S. looking for ways to censor all kinds of hateful tweets, not just the racist kinds.  Some people even think social media impacts what we think about other races, those people are right.  People are naturally wanting to belong to something so if they see a lot of people they know being racist, they might start acting racist.  This is essentially peer pressure, the same problem we’ve been facing since grade school.  Racism is prominent pretty much everywhere, and we have to do our part to stop it as soon as we can.