Welcome back to my blog!
Today, we are going to touch on the usage of social media to draw awareness to environmental issues. We often say that being so attached our screens disconnects us from our environment but is that really true?
Would you have known about the Amazon rainforest wildfire if not for the buzz about it on the Internet? Unless you actively seek for such news, my guess would be probably not. It was through the posting of such news on Twitter and Instagram Stories that the news itself was able to spread like wildfire. It was also through the usage of social media that individuals and organisations were able to generate donations for fundraisers and signatures for petitions to support the efforts against these environmental issues.
However, social media are also major propagators of fake news. An Instagram account which claimed that they were going to donate $1 for every ‘like’ they garnered was going viral during the period of the Amazon fire. Social media does make it easy for people’s concern towards the environment to be taken advantage of.
Social Media also carries inherent biases, this being the result of it being run by people, who themselves have biases. Just like in Brazil, Indonesia faced severe problems from the burning of its forests. Large areas of forested land were being burnt, resulting in the release of toxic smoke and carbon into the atmosphere. The smoke and haze generated by the burning are toxic to human beings and thus a threat to human health. There is a need to generate awareness for this issue and garner enough support for such practices to be limited to safer levels and yet the issue garnered much less global attention on social media than that of the Amazon rainforest fires.
Personally, I have noticed trends of issues from countries in the Americas and Europe garnering more attention than those in the Asia and the African regions. There is a possibility that this is because many of the news outlets or sources we get information from are from the United States but there is still an issue with this social media bias as environmental issues in Asia and Africa deserve to have as much support from the global community as those in the Americas and Europe.