Social Media & Technology
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"As activists, journalists and citizens poured into the areas of Baltimore that were being affected, news of events arrived in my feed mere seconds after it occurred. By far the most powerful tool of the night were Twitter lists of accounts from people who were on the ground."
- Christopher Mims for The Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2015 |
With 64% of Americans and 85% of millennials owning a smart phone, mobilization of student demonstrations began over social media, and firsthand accounts of the riots streamed through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Vine.18 People's stories went viral and the world was instantly updated on what was happening on the ground. Largely due to the immediate impacts of social media, pastors and citizens groups promptly went to the streets in attempts to calm the situation. During the aftermath, people also used social media such as Facebook to organize cleanups. Mims asked, "Would the Baltimore riots of 2015 have been worse without the immediacy of social media?"19
While the advancement of technology and social media spearheaded efforts to bring peace to the wide scale disorder, it also presents an opportunity to escalate situations and spread misinformation. High school students used social media to call on other students to "purge," a reference to the 2013 horror movie about one night a year when crime is legal. As a result, police began preparing for what they expected to be a demonstration of high school students, which quickly evolved beyond juveniles and turned into violent protests.20 Additionally, while misinformation spread across social media platforms, rumors were just as quickly shot down and discredited by the people on the ground.21 Furthermore, social media's narcissistic association led individuals flocking to the scene, what Mims calls, "Facebook's version of disaster tourism."22 In such instances, social media poses more of a hindrance to peace rather than as a facilitator.
In reflection of the larger underlying issues, however, social media can play a positive force in uncovering inequities, poverty, and long-term civil unrest. In President Obama's statement to the public in the wake of the riots, he affirmed that such issues sparking the violence are not new. Though he said, "the good news is ... perhaps there's a new found awareness because of social media and video cameras that there are problems and challenges when it comes to how policing and how our laws are applied to certain communities, and we have to pay attention to it and respond.23
