Social Media is one of the most powerful weapons to have ever been invented. It gives the people a voice and it provides a direct path to change. With the continued expansion of cellular technology and wireless internet access, people from all walks of life in nearly any country will be able to use social media and interact with others. The addition of new opinions, ideas and experiences can spread throughout online users more easily than ever before. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular sites to use in both developed and developing countries. They provide the best and most innovative platforms for people to communicate about their everyday challenges and solutions and where to find others with similar interests. The most effective way for people using social media to institute change is to build these groups of people who are all willing to work for the cause and spread their message to others who did not get a chance to see the original idea. Activism is a key component to social media functioning to the best of its ability. Users have to see a movement and be genuinely interested for it to gain momentum. Just as students need to participate in classroom discussion or a crowd needs to add to the energy of a concert, social media users need to be engaged in the topics and expressions of their colleagues. This is where we run into a major problem: slacktivism. There are too many people who completely waste the potential that social media shows. Sites such as Snapchat are not put to an effective use and have not been the spark of any major movement or addition to society. The slacktivism on snapchat is especially shameful since it is such an easy platform to quickly communicate with large amounts of people. Though slacktivism is an overwhelming problem in our society, it is important to remember that not everybody can be involved in everything at all times. Those who recognize slacktivism are simply advocating for individuals to take interest in something they see as a problem and work hard enough to help find a solution through social media. There are millions of people across the globe who log into their accounts to view their friend's photos and wish them a happy birthday who then stumble onto something more intellectual and thought provoking. It could be anything from a video of recent victims of a natural disaster in need of food to an organization posting about a protest for racial rights in your neighborhood to an article about how many states have now legalized gay marriage and how people can persuade the few remaining states to do the same. Most people may see these, sympathize with those affected for a few minutes and maybe even go so far as to "Share" or "Retweet" a post to their own followers. However, online activism rarely goes beyond those few minutes of care and this is what we call slacktivism. One of social media's faults is that although it makes activism easy, it makes slacktivism equally as easy. Click baits, flashy ads and other friend's posts are distracting and demand attention. User's "Fear of Missing Out" contributes to their inability to commit to anything online, which ironically causes them to miss out on the only things that are actually meaningful when they use their social media. The amount of slacktivism on the internet can be reduced with a functional social media platform for people to use, invested interest instead of passive use, and less distractions from pointless features.

Our society has the ability to work past slacktivism on our social networking sites. Since the launch of Facebook, oppressed and voiceless people have taken advantage of the internet to launch campaigns against harsh governments and leaders, pass laws and defeat social injustices in their homes and overseas. Surely Mark Zuckerberg could not have predicted that. Probably the best example of people joining together and using multiple social networking sites, including Facebook, is the Arab Spring. The main component of entire governments being overthrown, of former leaders being imprisoned and millions of people having their rights reinstated is their organization on social media. The motivators behind the Arab Spring are not part of an elite class, nor do they have any advantageous position besides the fact that they are members of a social networking site. The beauty of these programs is that they are free to everyone and all inclusive, no matter the social or economic standing. This is hugely important since the majority of the world belongs to lower and middle class groups, who suffer the most injustice, yet have historically had the quietest voice. Once things like Facebook, emailing and texting became more easily accessible in developing countries in Northern Africa, such as Egypt, angry residents noticed that their neighbors and fellow Egyptians had similar thoughts about how their country was being run. As soon as the first activists took to Facebook, news spread across Egypt like a wildfire that protests were planned and people were finally going to stand up to Mubarak's  regime.  Demonstrators showed up at Tahrir Square in droves as people shared information that they saw online through texts, emails, tweets and Facebook posts. A revolution occurred almost instantaneously due to the perfect communication platform that Egyptian citizens had access to. A movement of this caliber would have been virtually impossible to organize without our recent technological advances. In the past, it would have taken the finances and man power of an entire government or army to be able to gather such a massive amount of people and do something like uproot another country. Another possibility is that it could have started a war that lasted years and cost thousands of lives. Though revolting against a government is never completely safe, social media enables more peaceful protests and action that requires numbers of people that authorities could not simply silence. Not only was this the case in Egypt, but the citizens of Libya, Tunisia and Yemen also managed to remove their own oppressive dictators and regimes. Numerous other Middle-Eastern and North African countries experienced unrest within the citizens. Though the Arab Spring was the most successful and large scale movement taken through social media, some have still not felt the effects of more modern technology. Unfortunately, human rights crises are still alive and in places like Syria, the citizens still do not have a voice. This is because of the lack of infrastructure and the war for control between President Assad and ISIS that causes blackouts and destroys any access that Syrians may have had to cellular and internet.

Another, more local example of activism takes place in the United States. Social networking in lower class African American communities has shed light on recent racial issues involving authorities. Most notably, the town of Ferguson rallied around the family of Michael Brown. Social media introduced things like the Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter movements, as well as making the phrase "I can't breathe" famous after video of Eric Garner's brutal treatment first surfaced on social media. If not for those who recognized that change needed to happen, these incidents could have gone completely unnoticed by the general public. Social media allowed people close to the situation to extend the news of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to an audience that would have otherwise been left out by the national news outlets. After word reached many people in the lower class minority communities, the national media was forced to report on the issue as well. Ignoring it would have made them look horrible. As these tragedies reached a national level of attention, anger grew amongst our people and many returned to social media to organize movements to remember the victims and bring the perpetrators to justice, as well as shed light on the scale of the problem. Victims like Tamir Rice came to attention and the movement grew. Social media users joined forces to organize marches and peaceful protests, sometimes of hundreds of thousands of people, in nearly every major city in the United States. Famous people with millions of followers took to their social networking accounts and participated in the movements in person once they had been organized. This type of activism has lasted years in the United States and has made a difference in policing lower class communities. 

In order for an individual to really want to be a part of something, it has to be an issue that they are interested in. Would a man sign up for a three day deep sea fishing trip if he had never been fishing before and nobody close to him had any experience with it either? The same concept applies when users are scrolling through their news feeds and they see that an earthquake hit a place like Haiti. Some folks have never felt an earthquake, or been displaced from their homes so they cannot relate to the victims of the natural disaster. This is a lack of invested interest because sometimes it is simply too hard to understand or even care enough about certain situations. However, for the people who logged into their social networking accounts and maybe they had been to Haiti, or they had experienced a major earthquake in the past, this situation hit a little bit closer to home. These are the people who end up taking action because they have invested interest in the subject at hand.

The modern human suffers from more distractions than ever before. We mainly use social media as a distraction from our everyday duties, and even there we are tempted by a million flashing icons that beg us to keep moving on without really absorbing anything. 

Though Facebook and a few other forms of social media were adequately used for communication among activists, slacktivism still exists. It will always exist and it is not a deed that can be eliminated from our brains.

