Reddit Is An Effective Tool For Social Change, It’s What Blogging Wants To Be
Reddit is more than a social link sharing platform and micro-blogging service, it’s a platform for change that helps social issues gain momentum and the platform proved that point once again this week when it helped a bullying victim target their bully.
A student under the pseudonym “Sarah” posted about a bully who was bothering them offline and online. As evidence mounted about the bully and their propensity towards death threats the Reddit community stood behind the victim.
The students school was soon flooded with emails demanding that action be taken, ironically some of those requests were “a little nasty” and “bully friendly” on their own.
Regardless of the email attacks and their often nasty message, Sarah showed up at school the next day at which point the schools principal called the police, allowed all victims involved to share their stories and ultimately have the police called in to question the bully.
According to the final outcomes report:
School administrators later alerted county police of a harassment allegation involving a female student. A two-day investigation followed, police spokesman Justin Mulcahy said. On March 16, officers arrested the 17-year-old boy and charged him as a juvenile with harassment. He was later released to his family.
While this is only one example of how Reddit can be used to engage an audience there are hundreds of other social change movements happening on the popular social sharing website everyday.
Blogging allows a single user to share their thoughts, potentially with millions of people, Reddit on the other hand delivers millions of people to the user, perhaps that’s why more and more users are turning to Reddit in order to share their ideas and opinions. Put simply, Reddit is to social change what blogging has attempted to be for social change.