The Chapel Hill tragedy on Feb. 10 in which three young muslims were murdered left shock and outrage within the North Carolina community and all over social media. Many sent out support to the victims and families by trending the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter with the belief that their deaths were the results of a hate crime.

Social media serves as one of the best platforms to get a message across and millennials have begun to change both how and what information gets shared. Social justice issues have taken center stage on many social sites including Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. In 2014, other popular trends included #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen and #BringBackOurGirls.

While many people raised awareness in a positive way, during the peak of these issues, many people disputed and pointed fingers in terms of who to blame.

In order for millennials to establish a more informed and productive environment on social media, users need to create a safer and less hostile space for people to voice their opinions on these issues. If millennials do this, it will allow social justice concerns to not just be spread by individual users, but by the sites themselves.

These issues only trend if users post about them, but often they eventually stop being talked about or they are removed from trending lists. Last summer #BlackLivesMatter first started trending in response to the murder of Michael Brown and kept trending on and off as a string of other African Americans died as a result of police brutality.

In December, Tumblr cleared most of the tag and stopped trending it when users began sharing private information about people who had opposing beliefs. Users posted addresses and work information in hopes that these people would receive backlash for their opinions. Social justice issues deserve attention on social media, but the conversations surrounding those issues cannot be so polarizing that social media sites don’t feel comfortable promoting such content.

This is not to say that people shouldn’t be upset about current events, yet when these issues become a he-said-she-said affair, it not only removes the spotlight from the situation at hand, it becomes more likely that the social media sites will stop featuring the content.

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Snapchat provided a story for the protesters in France, yet never created one for the protests all over America from Ferguson to New York City. It could be argued that due to some looting during protests, Snapchat didn’t want to feature them, but most of the protests were peaceful. And Snapchat never put the University of North Carolina vigil on a story.

Although users have some control of what gets highlighted on these sites, the developers and owners have the ability to reach the largest audience. We hold a lot of power on our keyboards and our voices do matter. Our generation has reinforced the evolving way in which news gets distributed, as well as the role of social media.

Millennials need to both communicate in more productive ways on these issues and urge social media sites themselves to create more featured content on behalf of social justice issues.

The real activism comes through doing more than just pointing a finger. Activism begins with starting the conversation on how these issues can come to an end, and that begins with lending the microphone to those who have been silenced.  More than that, it comes by providing a social stage like social media to speak on.

Laritza Salazar is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at lcsalaza@syr.edu.

Published on February 24, 2015 at 12:15 am