When Gangs Go Viral: Government Use Of Social Media

Ever since the 2016 presidential election, many people are turning their attention on the influence of social media and it’s overall impact on democracy. Personally, I think social media is playing a huge role in the changes of democracy; and social media is also responsible for the challenges democracy is currently facing. Social media is influencing the slump of democracy because of fake news, contradictory views being expressed online, and automated accounts also known as “bots.”

Throughout the year 2014 Andrew V. Papachristos, Anthony A. Braga, Eric Piza, and Leigh S. Grossman published an article on street gangs, social networking and gun violence. The tile of the article is THE COMPANY YOU KEEP? THE SPILLOVER EFFECTS OF GANG MEMBERSHIP ON INDIVIDUAL GUNSHOT VICTIMIZATION IN A CO-OFFENDING NETWORK. The group of authors wrote the article to show what gangs are capable of while they are out on the streets of Newark, New Jersey. Per the authors, having friends who identify as gang members of certain gangs makes you more likely to be a victim of a gang shooting.

The 21st century has witnessed some of the greatest development in the field of social media up to this point. The creation of social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube has established a crucial platform for communication and connection between different parts of the globe. In the past few years, SNS has not only been used to share our personal experiences with friends and families but has become an important platform for political discussions. With the exponential increase in the number of users for SNS, it has become the main source of news coverage for thousands of Y and Z generation populations. I would argue that social media is a bitter-sweet gift that presents us the opportunity to bring the world closer, but at the same time makes it easier for dominant groups to influence the subordinate group. Depending on how a person uses social media, it can have either a positive or negative effect on the individual’s political and global awareness.

Social Media has become universal in the day to day lives of Americans. Every ad, television show, and even food products incorporate social media for revenue. With recent revelations concerning social media involvement with spying it should be common knowledge to be wary what you post, yet for many people social media is now a memoir. By simply clicking a button you can post your life online for anyone to see. Although it's believed to be for the greater good, the use of social media to spy on citizens an invasion of privacy and a direct violation of the fourth Amendment.

Social Media is a current way in which people are using to interact with one another daily. Since the launch of various Social Networking Sites (SNS) its been a huge attraction in a new way to share information with others and correspond with interests of your choice in many different forms. Although social media sites allow users to share information with friends and other sites on the internet, many people are unaware of how their privacy is getting out. Now that the expansion of global connection through these social media networking sites are so highly present in todays society, giving us easy access to information, the lack of one's privacy is being diminished. Everyday peoples privacy rights are

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate, not always is that a good thing. The government should be watching for trigger words like assassination, rape, suicide, murder, and human trafficking just to have a few. Messaging apps should be monitored too. There are dangers of fake accounts, sharing, posting and trafficking information that would, and could possibly harm people in communities. Video apps such as YouTube is a massive issues within the topic of social media. For example ISIS posting videos of decapitation and murder. Now that is a very scary thing. Postings like that should be targeted by the government and stopped.

“The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media – over 100 million people! I can go around them”, declares a Donald Trump tweet from just a few days ago. With over 32.5 M followers and 35 K tweets, Donald Trump is currently at the top of the list for biggest social influencers, which means even if a fraction of his followers are influenced by his words he has a large effect on our society. Although many political figures have argued that social media connects them with today millennials; the government should create a boundary whenever an elected official abuses their authority with negative, confidential, or outrageous social media postings.

“One of the most popular social media sites, Facebook, has 1.4 billion users around the world, nearly a fifth of the world's population, thus helping us to better understand, learn and share information instantaneously making the world look like a small village” (Amedie 2015, Pg. 5). This just shows how many people are watching and reading articles, which pop up on their timeline. Another thing Facebook promotes is different social groups. This makes it easier for individuals to join groups, and these groups could be radical groups or hate groups, which promote supremacy or racism. If people are exposed to extremist or racist views through social media, they could easily be emotionally swayed to participate in criminal acts against other groups. “In today's world, it is undeniable that social media plays an important role in impacting our culture, our economy and our overall view of the world” (Amedie 2015, Pg. 3). Social media is the platform that brings people to exchange ideas, connect with one another, seek advice and offer guidance, good or bad. Since the start of the social media era, communication barriers have been removed and the door has been opened for people to voice or share their opinion, as they please. Again the media outlet accommodates a wide variety of formal and informal unscholarly writings to

When we hear the word gang we automatically think about crime and violence committed by a certain group of people. The misconception of how we generally associate “gangs” is extended to us by main stream society which relates that gangs are linked to antisocial behavior and are to be composed of generally of criminal involvement with violent motives. An actual definition for what a gang is does not exist due to that gangs vary on a number of dimensions including size, use of symbolic representations of membership, age of gang, age of members, level of organization, and involvement in crime (). There exist a variety of gangs, no two gangs are alike and their role in society may be distinct for example one gang might be good and another gang

" We the people of America is every citizen. Not just the people living in America. Recently we had to deal with this problem. This wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. Strava a workout app used by billions of people. While this helped cities to create running and biking lanes. Some people who use this app are active military men and women. These heat maps just released some top secret information about bases in restricted areas. Although this may have started as an innocent act. But when people release this data it is dangerous for our fellow members. Along with this Facebook for runners is our real problem with Social Media. The government with the maturity should prohibit what is always necessarily available because of the influence to be mean and demeaning and recently a threat to the secret military bases.

Governments around the world watch citizens under the pretext of national security. Since social media is widespread in many people and lots of people open their private pages so anyone could read, governments monitor social media using Big Data technology. Though many countries covertly do social media oversight, effectiveness on security is still unknown. Current state of Big Data technology can merely figure out what the sentence

Governmental observation of what people post online is very controversial; many believe it could prevent or stop cyberbullying. Despite this idea, many believe it also infringes on Americans’ right to freedom of speech. Monitoring social media should be a choice for parents to make, not forced upon everyone by the government, whether it’s local, state, or federal. Communist countries monitor their citizens’ internet even to the extent of blocking websites they do not want to be viewed. Monitoring internet content would make America one step closer to taking away it’s citizens’ freedoms.

Walk into a library, you have a computer, you are most likely carrying a phone, at home, you most likely have a computer, laptop, tablet, or even all three. This shows that we have social media access at the tip of our fingers, making it so easy to open up the site or app and just type out a phrase or paragraph, letting hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions, of people know what you think. Back then, it was harder to let the nation know what you were thinking, and it took even take months before everyone knew, versus today, where the nation might know by the end of the day, and it’s because of this that companies regulate what their users are posting, attempting at keeping the online world free from threats, hate, harmful words, and more. Rutenberg quotes Jeffrey Goldberg as he says, “At a certain point I’d rather take myself off the platform where speech has become so become so offensive than advocate for the suppression of that speech” (2). Twitter also said that “everyone on Twitter should feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, but behavior that harasses, intimidates or uses fear to silence another person’s voice should have no place on our platform” (Rutenberg 2).

Social media is the pumping heart that gives life to the information that citizens receive. It is not the only form of communication, however it has become a fundamental method to present our thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and opinions to other people. It has become a necessity in American society to use media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to instantaneously access or send information.When words are censored, it strangles our ability to effectively communicate what we may be thinking. Similarly, when ideas are censored, our ability to progress as a society and as a nation is hindered. Censorship has been employed by other governments in the past as a method to influence the way a people may think about or view a topic. Therefore, government censorship of social media runs the risk of encroaching upon constitutional rights due to overreaching information control policies.

In Tim Dwyer’s book Convergent Media and Privacy he talks about how “Today, in the media, there is a tendency towards the dissolution of the boundary between the private and the public” (Dwyer 32). In other words, the separation between privacy and the public has become smaller. He also talks about in this chapter of how the advancement in social media technologies has started to cause more concern for considering the meaning of privacy and the consequences of power being abused to trample over people’s rights. The Author also goes on to talk about how popular social network media platforms like Twitter and Facebook monitor their users to see what they search, like, dislike, and what they buy so that they “get to know their users” (Dwyers 91). This allows these social networks to target users with specific advertisement that appeals to them. He also