SUBMITTED LATE WITH APPROVAL

The internet has become a place full of different knowledge and some of that being good and some being bad. It also a place where anything can be posted and shared will millions of people all around the world in a matter of minutes. Sometimes we just scroll through social media giving out likes and retweets or shares with out really looking deeply or at all into what the post really is. This leads to a lot of misinformation or fake news being spread and then no one looks into where the information is coming from and how creditable that source may be. This has lead to many problems in recent years with stories that either don’t have the full truth or are just running off of what some random person wrote to just get some likes and shares. While most of this blame fall on the news media for not trying to find the whole truth and even looking into see if there is any truth to what is being said. The other falls onto us and making sure that we hold the media accountable to telling the truth and not waiting to be the first to publish a story to get an advantage and get more views to make money on something that isn’t even true. We also have to make sure we fact check and do our own research into topics before we share something so that we know for ourselves if its truthful or not.

This is talked about in the article “Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?”. This article that we read this weeks talks about the Boston Bombing that happened during the Boston Marathon that happened just a couple of years ago. The police released a rough looking picture of the two suspects of the bombing. During this time and prior to the bombing the Tripathi family was looking for there 22 year old son who had gone missing from Brown University. The family made a website dedicated to finding their son that showed pictures and messages from loved ones hoping for his safe return. Then a little after the pictures of the suspects was posted a Reddit user put an image of Sunil Tripathi, the missing son, and suspect number 2 and commented on how much they looked a like. Then after just a few hours the family started to receive hateful messages and then someone random account tweeted that the Boston police had indicated Sunil as the second suspect over the scanner. This misinformation then spread like wild fire being retweeted or the information being tweeted our by popular accounts getting thousands of retweets and this lead to even more hate. This then lead to the family taking down the website and this lead to more speculation that taking down the site meant that Sunil was the second suspect but in reality the family didn’t want him to see the hateful messages and go even further away. Taking down the site lead to even more hateful messages all caused from a reddit post and an uncreditable tweet that should of never effected the family had anyone done a little more digging.

Two more article we read “6 Reasons Why Revenge Porn Is Really F*cked Up” and “The Humiliation of Katie Hill Offers a Warning” which talk about revenge porn and how its kind of become a norm of the internet era. Revenge Porn which most of the time is videos or pictures that were taking with or without consent then being posted to the internet with out the consent of the people in the videos. I think this is something that needs to be dealt with and the posting of such content should not be allowed unless consent if given in person from all parties involved in the video or pictures. The articles also talks about how most of the time nothing ever happens to people who share the videos or pictures but nothing ever happens to the website that they are posted too. Then for someone to get the video or pictures down from the site they have to pay a fee. I think its ridiculous that the website that has the videos or pictures can’t be forced to take them down when found to be revenge porn and that they charge the victims fees to do it. This is something that needs to be looked into and change as soon as possible because no one deserves to have that done to them. Do you think that consent should be need from all parties in the videos or pictures for them to be posted online by websites or journalist?

News Article:

With most of the articles this week focusing on the bad spread of news and pictures on social media. I figured my news article this week would cover what LIVE:PD has done to help finding missing children. They do a segment on missing children looking for tips from views on there children which has lead to many families being reunited with there missing loved ones.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/year-girl-missing-2016-found-safe-tip-tv/story?id=54082171