The Importance Of Facebook And Social Media

About six years ago when I first started using Facebook, it was a site that was primarily used for keeping up with friends and family. There were constant status updates and pictures of what my Facebook friends were up to, but that was about the extent of it. However, as I’ve grown up and social media has matured, it now seems that Facebook has become more focused on what is going on in the world. It now is a primary source for people to get their news. Much of what you find and learn about is news that isn’t necessarily broadcast on the mainstream media, and it isn’t filtered or sanitized like you’d find in a newspaper or on the six o’clock news. In the last year or so, I’ve noticed that a lot of the uncensored and uncut videos have been …show more content…
I started off with the suggestion of VCU’s library directory and I had a hard time finding what I believed at the time was what I needed. So I went to Google for answers; I searched “violent Facebook videos” and theorized that I should only focus on articles that have been published in the past year. Surprisingly enough, I found a slew of articles on precisely what I was looking for. Before I get into specific articles, as a general basis for my paper, I thought it would be useful to know what exactly Facebook’s policy is regarding graphic content. To me, the policy is a little “loosey-goosey” and not defined well enough. To paraphrase, if you post a video and condemn the violence, it can stay, even if a vast amount of people report it and suggest it be taken down. But, if you post it with a caption that encourages the violence or pokes fun of the victim, it will be removed. Locked and loaded with this information, I surmised that I should find an article that correlated the policy. I actually learned later on in my “finding sources journey” that most of the articles I came across discussed the policy at some point; reiterating the fact that it’s a good idea to outline the exact policy in my final paper. To that point, the author of the article “Facebook refuses to remove this video of a dog being beaten and hanged, and here’s why,” Mike Wehner, …show more content…
This is when it began to register that I needed to reorganize and formulate a better research plan for this paper. Only considering non peer-reviewed articles at this point, I knew I wanted to tackle Facebook’s new “live” video feature. Thus, I selected a story that summarizes what a live video is and what it means for the future of uncensored media. While I was searching for the aforementioned article, I came across a number of headlines that mentioned “beheadings” on Facebook. Originally, I only wanted articles that were recently posted and although these were stories from a few years ago, I came to the conclusion that it was a necessary topic to be noted in my paper. As a matter of fact, I remember the huge controversy about these “radical” videos. Terrorist groups were posting videos of beheading Americans and Christians for the world to see, and since the mainstream media couldn’t show this extremely graphic content, people were searching for it online: one big source being Facebook. Jenny McCartney, author of “Facebook beheading: Some videos should never be watched” notes that the site had a hard time deciding whether they should keep the videos up or not, but ultimately determined that they should not be taken off, of which she disagreed. McCartney had a great point that the terrorist videos, like child