Social media is the next big thing where communication is concerned. It has been used to report on societal upheavals; it has been used to spread word of pets for adoption; it has even been used to incite riots.
But are we in Singapore responsible enough to use it correctly?
In early October, a post of an alleged thief, caught on CCTV, began to go out over Facebook. The blurry photo, pulled directly off the CCTV footage, showed a girl in a neon green shirt who had apparently stolen the wallet of another student.
In that Facebook post, the victim asked for help in sharing the photo, and in tracking down the thief.
Within minutes, the alleged thief’s Facebook profile was found. Photos she had set to be shared by the public were posted all over as netizens mused on the likelihood of the former being the alleged thief, solely based on the t-shirts she had on. Incidentally, the girl did have a penchant for neon green shirts with lettering on the front.
However this case came to an abrupt end when the victim made another Facebook post, requesting that everyone remove the photo of the alleged thief from their walls. She claimed that she had already gotten some suspects, and that she was getting into trouble for spreading the photo around. The remarks made by netizens on the photo had been less than kindly.
Whether the girl pictured in the CCTV photo was the thief was never revealed to anyone. A Facebook search revealed that the victim had either fully privatised her account or shut it down, presumably to avoid further questions or ridicule. However, the consequences of spreading the former’s photo all over the internet still linger in forums.
The most pressing question is whether the victim had thought of what would happen if the girl in the photo had not been the one who stole her wallet. The CCTV footage shows the girl walking by a lift lobby; it’s innocuous, devoid of any concrete evidence. If she had not been the thief, what would happen to her reputation then? Would she forever be branded one because of someone being too trigger happy?
Even if she had, Singapore is no longer stuck in the medieval times, where thieving deserved public punishment or the lopping off of one’s entire hand.
People often parrot the phrase ‘the power of social media’, but do they truly understand that it can go both ways?
