Life is complicated, you go through this process of fitting in and trying to please everyone. It really makes you think am I doing this because I want to or is it for someone else. We like to think we make a lot of our decisions based on our own viewpoints, but I believe that many of us don’t actually do this. Don’t worry I do this too, but it’s not so much our faults, but social media instead. On social media people have this free reign to really say what they want and if enough people agree with one person they can’t get in trouble for what they say. It’s so easy to not really care what you say to people online because what can they really do to you. The answer is nothing unfortunately, this makes navigating social media so much harder. Now this week we saw something similar to this idea in a Black Mirror episode called Hated in the Nation.

This was a very interesting episode it really makes you think about what technology can become and the affect media can have on a society. This episode revolves around these gruesome murders by little robot honey bee’s, that were created by a private tech company because of the extinction of honey bee’s. The UK government at there request asked the company to create a security hole, which ended up letting anybody able to hack the bee’s and rerouted to attack and kill specific people. How they decide who to kill is by using #DeathTo and this gives the people the power to decide who should die with a lottery in a sense. This gives way to public executions by mostly well known famous people. Although the people didn’t know that by them tweeting this hashtag they’d be actually killing people, it just goes to show that people don’t understand the consequences of their actions. Even if they weren’t actually killing these people it still doesn’t make it right to wish death on someone.

Let’s say we look away for second at the technology aspect of this, but instead look at the media part. One of the articles we had to read this week called “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet” goes over how trolls are destroying the very reason we came to love media in the fist place, which is to spread ideas and to share aspects of our lives to others. Instead these trolls have turned it into a hostile and not very pleasant platform, making it hard for people to enjoy those aspects of spreading ideas and sharing parts of your life with others. Some examples the author used were how back in 2011 people went on the facebook memorial page of recently deceased people and made jokes about them being dead. Another one about Jessica Valenti who said she was leaving social media because she received a rape threat against her daughter who is five. Just like in Black mirror this shows how peoples actions on social media go unpunished regardless of the act done against others.

This article is about how President Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly change the makeup of the Supreme Court for years.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/politics/donald-trump-amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court/index.html