Social media share should observe culture, norm

“Any man`s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. This is because no man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent,” once said John Donne, an English poet, scholar.

This has been worsened by the social media, a relatively newer technology that has robbed the people of their privacy and instead subjected them to identity theft, personal attacks, and misuse of information shared with different intentions in the public eye.

If you can’t imagine your life without social media, you’ve probably fallen victim to the strong power that social networking sites have over the public. And if you are not careful, unscrupulous people can target you for cyber bullying and harassment on social sites. School children, young girls and women can fall prey to online attacks which can create tension and distress. If you are a victim of cyber bullying, do not take it lying down, but try to take appropriate legal action against the attacker.

To be exact, it is against many African cultures and Tanzania inclusive to share pictures of road accident victims or sick people with the intention of belittling or laughing at them.

In any accident scene, the public expect sympathy to the injured and all sorts of assistance in pursuit of saving lives, not photo taking session and selfies as if nothing is serious.

Tanzanians, especially the youth who might be enslaved in social media, should now be educated on the consequences of posting images of fatalities from accidents- that this kind of meme is misplaced and not within our tradition, because any person’s death affects all of us.

The fact that you feel as though you need to post the photos of accident victims should be a sign that it’s time to evaluate your social media habits, because there are also laws in the country governing use of social media outlets.

Have you even considered that you and your friends aren’t the only people on Facebook? That those images you share can so easily be seen by a child or a person who can not bear with traumitising pictures? Not to mention trauma survivors, accident survivors, people with Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses, relatives and acquaintances of the deceased that could be triggered by the images you insensitively share.

The list might be long because at the end of the day, sharing such images might cause a terrifying mental health conditions, causing flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety to those, who lost their dear relatives and friends and would not be happy to be reminded.

By and large, everyone in the public should realize that any growing trend among social media users to post pictures of the dead or injured on platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp, among is a bad in taste, against court guidelines and liable to legal action.