Social Media and World Events.

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        Social media is a great tool that has helped society progress in terms of exchanging information, now days people can learn about events that are happening around the world in a matter of minutes and give out their opinions on world events. Some of the news that receive the biggest reaction on social media sites are catastrophes that happen in other countries, or events that cause an emotional erection from people. We are going to be focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis and how social media has reacted and interacted with this event, be it people’s opinions on the event itself or the comments on their reaction.

        The first thing that we are going to analyze is how social media has been helping the Syrian refugees. When people started taking notice of the plight that many of the refugees were going through many news sites and social media pages started uploading the stories of some of the refugees to share them with the world. Whether they did this to gather views or for getting a reaction out of people will depend on the news that was published. However, we can’t deny that some good came out from that. The U.S. Department of State’s website Share America shows us just a few cases in which social media has helped refugees, one of them was a crowdfunded charity effort started by Kickstarter that thanks to “[m]ore than 25,000 donors raised $1.77 million, funds that helped provide over 7,000 refugees with immediate necessities” (ShareAmerica, 2016). Another case was that a few women through Facebook decided to star an organization called One Refugee Child with the purpose of helping refugee children improve their living condition. A few more cases are presented but most of them have one thing in similar, that is people from around the world coming together sharing the stories of the refugees and doing something to help them, whether it is sending them money, food, life necessities, and in some cases helping them reunite with their families.

        Of course as it is the case with most things for every good aspect there is a bad one, and one that has greatly affected this situation has been fearmongering, racism, hatred, and even threats directed towards the refugees by people on social media. According to a report on a study made in Concordia University that tries to “explain how teenagers and young adults […] interpret online interactions, then decide whether to approach refugees or to exclude them based on those interpretations” (Desjardins, 2016). This study by PhD candidate Nadia Naffi, reveals that after the volunteers were exposed to a certain type of stories their view was divided with some accepting the refugees while others were more exclusive, preferring to keep the refugees apart. Most of the sources that convinced people to reject the refugees were reporting events related to violence that was claimed to have been caused by foreigners in Europe, some of these cases included terrorist attacks, violence against women amongst a few others, it’s not like these fears are unfounded but they are not real all the time, however this goes to show just how big of an effect social media has on society.

        Social media has aspects that have helped others during crisis, but it has also turned people’s opinions against one another, but there is still a problem with spreading events through social sites. This problem is not something that affects others, it is the total opposite, political cartoon artist Ramzy Taweel illustrates this in his cartoon “Syrian Refugee Camps” (Taweel). In it he shows a male bringing food to his family who are trying to fight the cold with a fire inside their tent. However, instead of food there is the “like” symbol, from the Facebook platform, and the fire instead of using wood is also using “likes”, he also shows that the family cannot withstand the cold with the “likes” fireplace since they do not work, and they cannot feed themselves because what they have is not food. The author is trying to say that just giving likes to publications on social media will not help anybody, this comes from the fact that in social media many people show their support for a cause with a simple like but they don’t really do anything to try and actually help, either by donating food or money, which would actually make a difference. The artist criticizes this fad that is of no benefit to those that are suffering, a only helps those that seek attention by “click-baiting” others to get more views. This is an aspect of social media that doesn’t really do much damage but doesn’t help either, they damage that this causes is that it makes people believe that they are actually doing something, satisfying their self-righteousness, and so they don’t do any more to try and help.

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