Civility on social media is almost unheard of because of all the trolling that is done and all the people who like to say things behind their screen in which they would never say in person. I think social media platforms need to start taking action and banning people who take things too far on social media. For example someone who is telling someone to harm there self or telling someone they have no purpose and just other things that promote self harm. While doing that people will argue that people have the freedom of speech to say as they want but if Twitter was to put in the community guidelines about how that type of speech will not be tolerated and they actually ban people then people will be less likely to post stuff like that.  Another way I believe we can promote civility is by having civil discourse and not just bashing another persons views just because they are different from yours. People on social media do not ever have civil discourse because they are behind that screen hiding from their true identity, sometimes with their fake accounts, so they are not afraid to say anything and everything to anyone because they generally have no repercussions. The worst thing that can happen to them is they might get their account banned for a day and then the next day they will be back on social media saying whatever because no one is scared of getting banned for a day. Another way I believe we can promote civility is by ignoring the people who are trolling because they just do it for the comments back towards them so they can have a good laugh, so if we were to just ignore the trolls then their would be far less and fewer of them everyday because they would have no point of being there if no one ever responds.

Throughout reading the book Social Media Freaks: Digital Identity in the Network Society nothing really stuck out to me stats wise until I got into the section on online use on homophobic words. It was a project called NoHomophobes and it tracks the amount of times the terms faggot, so gay, no homo, and dyke were used on Twitter. The concept of this is very cool to me because it will show you how many times these words were said today, last week, and all time. In one day the word faggot was used 12,981 times, in a week it was said 112,851 times and in a two year span it had been said 29,550,670 times.

The reason I think this concept is so cool is for the whole reason they are showing the stats behind how many times it’s said in a day is because it’s marketing to people that it’s overused and that it’s not needed in today’s society. People use it so often evidently and the point of showing those numbers to everyone is to make an alarm go off in there head if they have been saying it to stop saying it because they are apart of society’s problem surrounding sexuality and the mistreatment of people in the LGBTQ community. I feel as if they have gotten their message to people clearly as it has won multiple awards and also has tracked in over millions of people to the site. The website is still up and running and it has shown progress because if you look in a five year span the word faggot has been said 10 million times which is still a lot but compared to their two year span where it was said 29 million times.

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