The Downside of Social Media
Early Tuesday morning one of the craziest things happened since I've been on this earth. If you missed it, the bridge in Baltimore, Maryland collapsed after being struck by a container vessel. On the massive ship, there were 21 total people on it and 20 of them are presumed to be good. However, on the bridge were six construction workers who fell into the water. All six were migrant workers, that’s important for later in the article. Two have since been found, and the other four are presumed to be dead. During the accident, the water was said to be around 40-50 degrees which is extremely cold. So, the divers were not able to get in and search because of that and there was a lot of debris from the bridge. This is a devastating situation, and my heart is with every single person involved.
Now with all that being said, you’d think everyone would be sympathetic and have empathy for the people involved right? Well, you’d be wrong. When the news came out that the six workers who fell were migrants, as usual X, formerly known as Twitter, erupted with very nasty and senseless opinions on the matter. I won’t put screenshots because I don’t like to give these people a platform. Though I will quote some: “Did you ask the mayor why he's hiring illegals to do city work?” “Go f*** yourself with your tiny proud Latino d***, Geraldo” was in response to the man simply saying they were migrants. It is disgusting that even in times of tragedy, we find a way to hate on and disrespect people of minority groups. If your first response when finding out that a person tragically lost their life, is wondering if they are legal or not, what their race or orientation is, then you are undoubtedly a racist person. I don’t throw that word around a lot because it’s hard to tell sometimes. However, in times like these, it’s pretty easy to differentiate those people.
This leads me to the next part. When the tragedy happened, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, 39 years old, addressed the media in the early hours as soon as he heard about the news. He handled that as well as he could have and answered every question to the best of his ability since the accident was still fresh. When listening to him speak, the only thoughts in my head were how the search was going and what was going to happen with rebuilding the bridge. Can you guess what started trending on X after he came out to talk? “Baltimore Mayor DEI”. Scott has been the mayor of Baltimore for four years, and all I could find on X about him is how he is unqualified, and that he only got the job because of DEI. By the way, Baltimore is 62.3% black people, so it makes sense that they would get a qualified black man who understands the majority of the people in that city. I always hear these same people complain about Joe Biden and Donald Trump being too old. Now we go with a young black man, who by the way has handled the criticism wonderfully, and we have a problem.
America was built on racism and has been this way for a very long time. Most of these people who have these hurtful opinions have always had these feelings. It’s now coming to light because of social media. Instagram and TikTok are a lot stricter when it comes to hate speech. X is now a cesspool of people being racist, homophobic, transphobic, and every other bad thing you can think of ever since Elon Musk took over. Just wanted to drop my two cents. Let me know down below what you’d like me to talk about next
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