An Analysis of Social Media’s Role in Sexism
“Informed Citizen Essay” was the Finals essay we wrote in the first Semester of my Junior year AP Language and Composition class. It was a research paper that had no boundaries for the students to adhere to – besides the MLA format – and it was required that we do our own research individually. As the rise of Instagram and Tiktok’s ‘brainrots’ grew in popularity, new short form content was one of the main sources of information and entertainment for teenagers such as I. However, with such freedom to post whatever you want, hate speech was fast to follow and spread around the internet. I felt my feed drowning in heaps of blatant misogyny, racism and many other forms of hate – all tied in with some silly audio in order to bypass the hate as entertainment. At the end of the day, the main audience of these reels and tiktoks are children, teenagers, and young adults. This does not only affect their mental health, but throughout my research on this topic, I came to learn that it affected teenagers’ real life behaviors. It increased rates of depression in both genders and depleted the self-esteem of young adults. These findings from my research changed my perspective on social media. Yet to a larger extent, the assignment also met its intended purpose; it helped me strengthen my rhetorical skills by developing a clear argument with evidentiary support.