Soon after the world learned of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Facebook provided people with the option to change their profile pictures to a transparent version of the French flag. This same trend was seen after the announcement that gay marriage would be legal in all 50 states, however, the change was done manually and was not prompted by Facebook. I immediately changed my picture, not only to show my support, but also as a constant reminder that innocent lives were lost and that we should never take things for granted. I was probably the third or fourth of my Facebook friends to change my picture before I noticed more than half of friends doing the same.
Quickly after other people began changing their pictures, memes and statuses were made on social media condemning those who have changed their pictures, and also Facebook as a whole for providing the option to change your picture to support Paris and not in other situations that people have deemed more traumatic, such as the mass murders at Kenyan University earlier this year.
I have only just noticed this Facebook trend which I believe originated from the filters on Snapchat. Maybe Facebook had not thought of the idea back in April when Kenyan University was hit with the tragedy, or maybe it was still being figured out. What is more important is this idea that a person cannot support one cause without neglecting another. Also, why does a person need to actively show their support on social media in the first place, but that is a topic for another day.
It is not right to think that one person’s life is does not deserve to be recognized because another person’s life was not. These are human beings with sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, co-workers and friends. These are people who mean something to someone and who were unjustly killed, but instead of honoring their deaths with peace, people have decided to argue over the colors of someone’s Facebook profile picture. With this new age of social media, anyone can have a say in the current events that happen in our world, but sometimes, the people talking are not the brightest crayons in the box.
The reality is that horrible things happen to innocent people every day, and it is unfair to blame a person for not reacting in the way that someone else thinks that they should. The option to change your Facebook profile picture should not be the cause of such negative backlash, especially when it concerns major tragedies. The focus should not be on which event is “better” than the next, it should be on what ways you can help those affected by it, or how you can personally make a difference. Once we begin to turn to ourselves away from the negative culture that social media sometimes breeds, I believe that responses like these will appear less and less.
