Social media has many benefits. It lets people communicate with each other, enabling in the globalization of ideas. However, social media robs people of their own unique opinion. Twitter makes it so easy to plagiarize other people’s thoughts with a simple retweet. Although social media makes it easier to voice one’s opinion, this opinion begins to carry less weight when you’re tweeting, favoriting, or hashtagging multiple items times per day.
This is why hashtag activism is a hopeless pursuit to fix the world’s problems. When it’s so easy to “like” something on social media, it becomes more difficult to fall in love with a cause.
One cannot fix actual reality through virtual reality. Hunger cannot be fixed with a click of a mouse. Nigerian girls cannot be returned home by changing one’s profile picture. These are large problems that require complex, thought-out solutions, not a bunch of teenagers trying to look like they care about the world in between watching LeBron highlights and snickering at Collegefession posts.
Many people in the country were rightfully outraged when Michelle Obama held up her #BringBackOurGirls sign. As the first lady, Obama has to set the example for the rest of the country by being a proactive leader, as she has beautifully done in her campaign to fight childhood obesity. An inspirational woman with much global power should know better than to think she can just take a selfie and convince Islamic militants what the right thing to do is.
This isn’t to say that one has to be Michelle Obama in order to make a difference. Any of us can get involved in the community and work actively to make a change. True, we might not be able to fly over to Nigeria and confront Boko Haram over this atrocity. But we can work to make our own community a better place by volunteering.
Social media does play its role in progressivism, as in order to solve a problem people must first be aware of it. However, what many people falsely believe is that their efforts can stop after clicking “Post.”