Social Media and Its Obsession With Blame

by Heysha Garcia Melendez

When an unfortunate event occurs, what is it that we see on the news? We see how many people died or a description of the person who caused the fault along with misleading titles. On the news, we see different people’s opinions giving you only one side of the same story. Not only this but pretty much everything we read is incredibly biased. This allows anyone to just focus on purely one side of the story.

When a large scale attack happens, we put so much effort on “who did what?” instead of focusing on “how did it affect others?” We post victims’ information with no regard to the family’s wishes and sometimes even make the victims seem like the bad guy. After the Parkland shooting, many articles were titled “19-Year-Old Orphan Kid Shoots up School”. This only focuses on the fact that he is an orphan and 19… Is that what really matters? Shouldn’t the victims be remembered and be recognized instead? Shouldn’t we attempt to provide peace to the grieving community? But all that we are doing is to continue to terrorize these survivors. We blame everything on them. Now we have adults making fun of and accusing survivors of ripping up a constitution or not being present during the shooting. Social media has helped spread these rumors with no one checking to see if it’s true. One of the students from Parkland released an article discussing why it isn’t their fault for the shooting. This article was written by Isabelle Robinson and titled “I Tried to Befriend Nikolas Cruz. He Still Killed My Friends.” This victim had to go out and say that they weren’t at fault for this happening, all because people kept seeing and repeating things like “Bullied Teen Shoots School”. Isabelle includes many things in this article like how rude he treated her and how she was friendly to him and he still did this awful thing.

Not only do we focus on whose fault it was, but we always criminalize the minority. If a person of color committed a crime, no one would think twice about calling them a terrorist or singling out that one group.The news we have now allows people to only view one side of a story and base all of their beliefs and thoughts on that one side. Some decide not to research or fact-check which has caused many to remain ignorant. This can be avoided if everyone puts in the effort to make sure they have the complete story.

Our nation is becoming divided and having biased news outlets isn’t going to help. The news is constantly avoiding certain topics and only highlighting certain things. It goes from placing blame on the victims to adding stigma to a certain minority. We’ve grown so used to only checking one source and now it’s a habit. The solution is to question everything and don’t believe everything you read. It’s 2018 and it’s time we start changing our way of living.

Sources: