Introduction to our Blog

Hi! We are Think B4 U Type, a Campaign raising awareness and mitigating the harms of online abuse and harassment for a group project at the University of Glasgow. 

We will be doing this through posts on several social media platforms- follow us along on the journey! 🐝

Instagram: @think_b4utype

Threads: @think_b4utype

Facebook: Think B4 U Type

We have decided to promote this cause on social media

because of the growing prevalence of political 

campaigns growing rapidly on social media. (Nielsen,

R. K., & Fletcher, R. (2020)) found that, 'Two-thirds (67

percent of respondents between eighteen and twenty-four 

now say online is their main source of news, compared 

to just a quarter (24 percent) who name television. Social 

media alone- just one of the ways of getting news online -

is more important for news for the youngest age group than television.' 

This shows that social media is a good way to reach people, and in particular young people which is who we are aiming to contact through our posts. Except from Facebook, where we are trying to reach parents, however, this platform is very popular amongst this group. 

Through this political campaign, we aim to raise awareness of the issues and consequences of online abuse and how this can affect people. In addition, we are going to show how to identify this type of harm on social media and finally, how to report it. We hope our campaign will enlighten and inform young people on social media who can often be impacted by this type of harm. We will be using different tactics in order to reach our intended audiences. On Instagram and Threads, we are going to try to reach school-aged teenagers who primarily use this app and, on Facebook, we are trying to reach parents (of these school-aged teenagers). To do this we will use the affordances of each platform to our advantage (Barnidge, M. (2020)). 

Over the next four weeks, we will be frequently posting on each social media platform and updating this blog to raise awareness of different issues and to hopefully aid in mitigating the harms of online harm and harassment on social media.

#ThinkB4UType #BeKind #BeSafe

Bibliography

Nielsen, R. K., & Fletcher, R. (2020). Democratic Creative Destruction? The Effect of a Changing Media Landscape on Democracy. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, 139.  

Barnidge, M. (2020). Testing the inadvertency hypothesis: Incidental news exposure and political disagreement across media platforms. Journalism, 21(8), 1099-1118.