By Cheyne Sampson
What do you say upon becoming acquainted with someone for the first time? Maybe you’ll ask, “What’s your Instagram,” or “What’s your snapchat?” Regardless, this is the entry to the realm of social media for a friendship or even relationship, and one may learn a lot about a person there.
Outside of normal human life there exists professional athletes, strong political figures, as well as actors and other well-known people. Unfortunately, just because one may be “The best” at something, doesn’t mean their opinion encompassing a matter much more important than say, basketball, holds much more power. But why is this?
If people see their favorite actor, or their favorite athlete perform in a certain fashion they may attempt to copy their moves. As a life-long basketball player and Kobe Bryant fan, I will happily admit that I did in fact steal several of his moves. Why? Because I wanted to be more like him. However, that was before I got an iPhone. The issue with “wanting to be more like someone” is that the person will have a platform that often advocate for a certain side in controversial topics.
The issue with today’s world is that social media and exposure to those who may be less educated has people forcing themselves to piggy-back onto a certain person’s opinion, regardless. This is an issue that is plaguing society right now.
LeBron James, a professional Basketball player, has 50 million followers on Twitter. At the time of President Trump’s stay in office, he was clearly disliked by James. James posted in 2017 on Twitter that Donald Trump is a “Bum.” Now, I am not sure if you believe this statement to be true or not, however calling out the president of our country with such a large following has major setbacks for our society. That is, over 50 million people who support LeBron James read that he considers our former President to be a bum. As a U.S. citizen, that makes me incredibly disappointed. It may be argued that half of these people lean neither right nor left on the political scale; however, if people see a controversial opinion from an idol, they are likely to stand by that opinion.
I believe that it is completely fine for high profile athletes to post on their largely followed media accounts to help spread awareness on issues, or even to encourage discussion. But to libel and create division of the people with opinions that may or not be the greatest is worse than creating discussion; it creates a pool of toxicity, and the loss of free-thinking. Many people who read that tweet likely had no idea what the President did to deserve such backlash, -however, based on all of the retweets and comments I believe that creating division and disallowing “free thinking” in a society like today is always a poor idea.
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