We live in a world today where everyone wants to air their views on social media, so whenever they're going through situations, they want to make posts and put them out there on the various social media platforms.
I must say that the outbreak of social media platforms actually paved a career path for a lot of people, and so you see different people making posts of themselves and doing other stuff, not forgetting to mention the social connections and recognition social media platforms have given a lot of people.
While social media has helped a lot of people, so many people have also been ruined because of their actions in their social media space, which is supposed to be their own, and because most social media platforms do not restrict the level of content that could be put out there, a lot of people have created content that should not be seen by the public and made it public for a lot of people to see. Every day you see people with different schools of thought coming to share their opinions to create an awareness or to enable them to become popular and sell themselves out there.
Now we have to understand that social media was created for real people who are part of a real world, and in that real world there are things that are morally acceptable and unacceptable, so when people try to put whatever random thoughts they have on the Internet, you want to first consider the impact such posts would have on your immediate community and the future impact it would also have on you.
A story was once told about a guy who had an account with one of the reputable banks in my country, Nigeria, and then, while he was in school, there was an issue with his account, and he went online to drag the bank on his social media platform, X, and it worked. Now, many years later, after graduation, he applied to the same bank he dragged many years ago. He interviewed for the role and actually passed the interview, but as a customer of some companies, he always required social media handles of their applicants.
The young man presented his social media handles, and they went through to find that there was a time he dragged the bank. Now, while that was his personal social media space and he had the right to drag the bank, the singular act made him lose the job opportunity.
We hear every now and then that people are having court cases with some corporate institutions and organizations because of what they post on social media, and that is why I started by saying, undermining the fact that the personal account belongs to whoever has taken their time to create it, you still have a moral obligation to post content that aligns with the places and organizations you find yourself in.
Posting negative comments about an organization or public entities might seem fun, but in the long run most of those things go ahead to haunt the future, so a more subtle way of going around, in my opinion, is to send constructive and creative criticism to such organizations in the form of feedback. Because if your opinions are wrong and without basis, they could take legal action. While your social media space is exclusively yours, you have to be discreet.
This is my entry for the Hive #hl-exclusive & #hl-w171e3 contest.