Social Media (Mass Bullying)

Social Media accounts like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (etc.) have always been a place to congregate with friends, peers, strangers and anybody else who makes an account. A man named Richard Dawkins, author of the book The Selfish Gene, coined a term that we use quite widely today in our society called memes. A meme, in his definition, is a way that cultural information spreads. A meme can be anything from a picture to a video and it is used ALOT throughout the internet usually in a satiric manner. Most memes usually follow stereotypes and are used to poke fun at people and their insecurities.

Recently, I have been seeing memes of people who aren't the most attractive. The memes described the people to be ugly and After seeing the same person over and over, it made me realize that this is an actual living, breathing person. This use of memes seems like a form of bullying. Just yesterday, I found one of the people that was being bullied that they called "patch" because of a condition that causes him to lose patches of hair. Patch is only a teenager but has attempted suicide due to a video that went viral of him walking down the street while a grown man in a car asks him "whats wrong with his head."

Since social media is so cruel and relentless, there will always be someone out there on the internet that makes fun of patch so now he will go down in history for being made fun of. This is a terrible fate. It causes us to lose a sense of security because anything you do can be turned into a viral video. It also gives us the incentive to bully each other in order to see who can capture the most embarrassing viral video. This is a ridiculous concept. To tear down your peers or even total strangers because they don't look like you're perception of what people look like is terribly morally wrong.

by Justin Woods