Recently in Korea, many celebrities have been suffering from the attack of ‘keyboard warriors.’ These ‘keyboard warriors’ are people who post extremely rude comments online, which are very offensive. Celebrities who experience this tend to go through a lot of distress. Because of this, they get mental diseases such as depression or even commit suicide in the worst case. But recently, a famous actress responded to a keyboard warrior in point of law and so, he had to pay huge amount of money as a punishment. By looking at this incident, people should realize that the punishment may be harsher than expected, and they might not be able to afford it.
We are now living in a world where people communicate, search for information, and even buy stuff using the Internet. Like this, our society was influenced in many ways by the development of the Internet and social media. However, this new type of communication had a fatal downside that people act in a rude way, abusing the anonymity effect. Anonymity is one of the main features of the social media. It contains the meaning of “without the name” and “namelessness.” As you can guess from this, anonymity is the state of being unknown to people. The problem is that some online users use this feature of the Internet in a bad way.
Even someone who is very polite might start hurting others’ feelings in the online world, where people don’t see each others’ faces. This causes ‘Malicious replies.’Offensive comments in other words, Malicious replies is a huge problem in the online world nowadays. Do you remember that I’ve mentioned the significance of ’malicious replies’ and the huge impact of it? It has been one of the major reasons that makes celebrities get diseases such as depression, or even commit suicide in the worst cases.
Then why should we, people living in Korea, care about this problem? It is quite obvious. Korea is currently chosen as one of the countries that has the highest rate of incidents related to online manners. The resolution for this problem is us. We are the ones that are using the Internet and the social media, and we are the ones that need to realize the significance of this issue and change our behaviors. Remember that the first step to solve this problem is the change of behaviors of us, users of the Internet.
We should raise awareness of this issue so that more people realize the seriousness. The next step is to change our attitude online. Never say things that you can’t say in the real world in the online world. Remember the basic manners as a user of the Internet, so that you won’t hurt others’ feelings.
Let’s make the most of the development of the Internet and social media by using it wisely and try to make a beautiful and peaceful online world.