Social Media Scaries
Written by Vaibhava Rajesh
Ever since I was younger, I was told about how people could instantly grasp your information through social media. Numerous horror stories about internet stalkers, trolls, or fake accounts were commonly told to me. Although I valued internet safety and trusted that harmful situations arise easily through the internet, I didn’t believe I could ever be put in a similar situation.
The longer I spent time on social media, the more I realized how easy it is to be targeted online. As high school started, I had decided to make my account public. My sophomore year summer, I was in some typical teenage drama, and received messages on my account attacking my appearance. They screenshotted my posts and ridiculed me for how I looked, all through fake accounts. I was in utter shock, and didn’t bother blocking the accounts. Eventually, the messages were unsent, but to this day I have no idea who could have messaged me regarding a teenage drama that very few people knew about. I truly understood what it meant and how easy it was to “hide behind a screen.”
A couple years later, after completely forgetting about this debacle, I received an email as I sat in my accounting class. The subject of the email was titled as my friend’s name, so I assumed she had sent me something. When I opened the email, I was horrified. Someone threatened to send over confidential screenshots and pictures to my parents that they had claimed to have collected from me. They even set up a message with my dad’s name on it, and put in an image from my social media, and screenshotted, almost as “proof” they had his contact information. This terrified me, as I worried whether they had other information that my parents were unaware of, which could damage my relationship with them. I was unsure of how much they actually knew.
When I checked my social media accounts, there were comments under my Instagram and TikTok that said “check your email.” The usernames for the social media accounts and email IDs matched up, and were all newly created. I went straight to the school office in tears, explaining the situation. After an administrator assured me that I was given an empty threat, I calmed down. The email that I had sent requested that I open a message on another website, which I didn’t end up doing. Every day, I would get emailed that I was running out of days before I would get “exposed” and simply disregarded them. Eventually, the emails stopped, and I didn’t get exposed after all.
Through those experiences, I realized that social media could easily be weaponized for those who want to inflict harm anonymously. I was thankful to be informed about internet safety and to reach out to people who could help me through these situations. Numerous presentations, videos, and lectures about social media safety made me roll my eyes in middle and high school but ended up being immensely useful when handling digital conflict wisely. Information regarding these topics must be widely spread, because despite all the advice I received leading up to these situations, I was still in a state of panic when encountering them. Being uninformed would have led me to make irrational decisions and escalated conflict immensely.
