Uses Of Social Media

There has been a lot research on the usage of social media. It has been utilized by people to achieve a lot of amazing objectives and goals and to bring happiness in the world. There have been a lot of exceptional campaigns that are currently being run on social websites like Twitter, Facebook and on internet as a whole. There are few other perspectives in which internet can be utilized in a positive way.

Role of media against sexism

It is not always that social media is used in a positive way. Internet and social media is largely used to belittle, offend and insult other people by discriminating against their race, cast or religion. One of the most popular cases that occurred on Facebook included several groups of people to develop pages to make jokes and content related to rape and domestic violence. Facebook intervened, took down all content but it was against their terms and condition to delete pages, so those pages were not deleted.

This incident encouraged Laura Bates, Soraya Chemaly and Jacky Friedman to act against it. They sought to get the content removed from Facebook. Their early attempts to reach to Facebook’s inappropriate content reporting system failed. Then they tried to contact Facebook directly, it was also fruitless. So they tried a new strategy, they targeted advertisers on twitter. This made the advertisers aware that their content is advertised alongside offensive content. They also introduced hashtag that said #FBrape. Finally the trio became successful. There were over 60,000 tweets and 15 major advertisers convinced to eradicate their advertisements from Facebook. This campaign was so successful that Facebook agreed that they should not have let this happen and future policies were made to stop this from happening again.

Teaching through Facebook

Now times are very different compared to when our elders were in schools. The current generation is the first one to be grown up with the facility of the truly omnipresent internet; they are the first generation who cannot anticipate a life without Facebook. How can the generation who did not have the facility of internet teach a generation for whom keyboard feels more comfortable than holding a pen or pencil? A school in Amsterdam has come up with an innovative way to solve this problem.

They are using social media and Facebook to teach subjects like history, which includes lessons like Magellan’s voyage, the rise and fall of Soviet Union, inventions of the 20^th century, and fashion of the 50s by using catchy images, timelines, and cover photos. An application like timeline is very attractive for young students as they can add events to their Facebook page. This strategy enables kids to learn something useful in a fun way.

The censor board in China has blocked and censored the internet. Facebook and twitter both are banned in the country in order to avoid disagreement but even after such strict rules people have found a way to make media more accessible.

A Chinese version of Twitter, known as Sina Weibo has helped to uncover corrupt government officials for example Yan Linkun. He was an official who carried out a destructive rampage as he was unable to board the flight. The video was recorded and exposed. It showed him destroying the property of the airport. This video became viral among users and led to Linkun’s removal from his post.

Gifts on large platform

Reddit is a mixture of a news aggregator and a social network. It is difficult to describe the exact function of the website. It is a strong and enthusiastic community. There are quite a few good things done by Redditors but ReditGifts is not the same as Redditors. It has long term goals and focuses mainly on doing well in society.

As part of Reddit community, ReddiGifts was a scheme that was used to exchange gifts for Christmas 2009. The idea quickly got popular and next year over 17000 individuals took part in the scheme. Since then the project has been really successful and has received extensions. They send gifts all year round now. They also have themed exchanges of gifts all year. One of the schemes was especially introduced for the troops in which more than 3000 individuals participated and gave gifts worth more than $20,000.

Returning memories to effected of tornados

To suffer or to be affected by a natural disaster is truly sad. Even with all of the possessions they have, people can be destroyed in an instant. There are many things that get destroyed in these natural disasters, but the most precious are the pictures of happy times. It is impossible to name the price of those priceless photos, as their sentimental value cannot be measured in monetary terms.

In May, 2013 people in Oklahoma suffered from a tornado. A number of properties were destroyed along with many lives. There were many people who offered help through social media. Concerned Facebook users developed pages like “May 2013 Oklahoma tornado &Photo Recovery Page” or “Oklahoma to the rescue”.

Pictures were uploaded which were found by rescuers in the rubble, so that they could identify owners and return them their priceless pictures. More than 12,000 people joined the original Oklahoma photo group. With the help of social media users residents of Oklahoma were given a bit of happiness and joy.