QUEZON City, Philippines (November 24) – Have you changed your Facebook profile photo? Do you know what those three colors mean?Are you even aware that Paris suffered a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of hundreds?
Imagine a regular day for a late 20’s employee: you go to work, sit down on your swivel chair and you look at your computer monitor. After checking your emails, you suddenly felt the urge to go to a certain website called “Facebook.com”. As you logged in, you unconsciously scrolled up and down to your newsfeed to check if there is something new. Then you saw this funny family picture of a girl with her children that looks very much different with her, it was something like a campaign for plastic surgeries. You liked and shared it to your friends – caption: “LOL, this is so funny”. You checked your post every after minute – 50 people liked your post and 4 shared your post, you felt so fulfilled making that person trend. But what you didn’t know is, that person actually lost her job because of that viral picture. To simplify things, you just contributed to the fact that the girl lost her job.
This is exactly how we use Facebook nowadays. We contribute to trends, not considering the truth behind it. According to statistics, 968 million of people log onto facebook daily as of May 2013, which is a 67% increase from August 2012 (Source: Facebook). Just imagine what would the impact be if more than half of those don’t use FB sensibly and responsibly. Scary, right?
If you haven’t notice the three colors – blue, white and red – covering your friends’ profile photos then may be you’ve spent most of your time offline. This is the new trend in the social media sphere. FB user after FB user choose to temporarily change their profile pic. But how many of those understand, or at least, is aware of the reason behind the trend. Yes, the horrible reality is that many Facebook users apply these colors because they wanted to be “in the trend”, completely unaware of its real meaning.
I am not very happy with this act, I consider this as double standard. Just because Paris is the capital of a well known country, doesn’t mean that we have to prioritize them. On the other hand, I also don’t mean that we have to not focus on them. My point is that Facebook is one of the best platform to inject people with social awareness. It is the best platform to let them understand the situation the world is facing right now. A lot of events are underrated nowadays. The famine in some parts of Africa and the terror attacks in Middle East and other countries are just a few things that come to mind. Facebook should be used to connect with people in every parts of the world; we should not be only talking about Paris.
And let’s face it, putting France’s flag on your Facebook profile picture doesn’t help at all. What you can do to really help the victims of the attack is to donate goods and/or money through different legitimate donation programs online. Arguably, this change in profile pic can help in raising awareness but Facebook should not have limited it only to Paris, France but to other countries as well.
(written by Clark Jason Mangahas, edited by Jay Paul Carlos, additional research by Lovely Ann Cruz)
