When I joined twitter last year it was so I could keep up with all my classmates and friends. Facebook was declining in popularity and, being a conformist, I switched over with the rest of my peers. At first it was great. Everybody's tweets were hilarious and entertaining. Now, I just find twitter to be annoying and most of the content is insensitive and rather obnoxious. I'd rather have tweets about what someone's doing rather than the racist, sexist and generalizing tweets that I see when scrolling through my timeline on any given day. I went on to my twitter and one of the freshest tweets I saw was this one from two of my former classmates.
I respect both of these guys. They're insightful, motivated, resilient individuals but seeing this made me loose a little respect for the both of them because of how carelessly they both could generalize men and women. As if every male is into football and women aren't. However, this exchange wasn't nearly as offensive as the following retweet.
Twerking is a whole different conversation but the fact that I saw this on my feed made me cringe. Twerking is objectifying, no matter what race you are and assuming that all African American know how to twerk is ignorant and insulting. Since when did twerking become a hard hitting topic anyways?
Along with the numerous amounts of tweets that I see from the people on twitter I follow, I also see a mass amount of retweets from accounts like the following.
With tweets like this. Some accounts are even named "Common Black girl" and "Common White Girl".
There are so many things wrong with these accounts. Not only do the "Common White Girl" and "Common Black Girl" accounts divide women but they also produce stereotypical and ignorant tweets about white and African American women. Most of the tweets I found were shallow. The bulk of the tweets produced from these accounts were about men and pinned women against other women. The most appalling thing is, however, that these accounts have thousands of followers and an endless amount of retweets and favorites. When I scroll through my feed, I can count on seeing at least a dozen of retweets from accounts just like the ones above. Not only do these accounts re-enforce the stereotypes associated with women but they also objectify men. The accounts all show an array of pictures of men with their shirts off and the accounts, often, treat the men in the pictures like pieces of meat. There is so much I could say about these accounts but I want to know what my classmates think of these accounts and the stereotypes that they perpetuate? Do you think accounts like these are harmful in any way?
I think that these types of accounts on social media does affect the outlook that the viewers carry of, in this case, White and Black Women. However, I feel that if the accounts are seen as exaggerated and overly stereotypical than it can do little to no harm. It is all in the eye of the beholder. A lot of the view on stereotypes on twitter and other social media has to be done with the idea in mind that they are wrong. Also, we have to think about the fact that almost all of these accounts are done for comedic value. I believe that little harm could be caused if people just thought about these accounts in a playful way instead of an attack on a gender or race.
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