When Naira Marley was creating a random video with his mobile phone while preparing to smoke weed few weeks back, he was just chilling, enjoying a private moment that he felt he needed to share with the public. And that act itself is not wrong.
How could it be, when we it is firmly part of our social media culture? Each and every one of us have, at some point, felt so good in the moment and thought to share that with our followers and other social media users. Can you recollect the number of times you were finely dressed and thought to ‘pepper’ and ‘tension’ the people on your Instagram feed with dope photos? Or the times you looked so peng to a wedding and thought to make several snaps of the ceremony to share with your followers? It goes on and on - everyone has several moments they store in pixels in order to either show off on social media, pass across a message, lend their voice to trending situation or to just, you know, flex on the gram.
Naira Marley [Credit - NaijaBaze]
But with Naira Marley’s curious case, a question that has always been asked has been resurfaced which is that; just how much are you supposed to actually share on social media? How deep into the use of these social tools should you go? What are the things to reasonably keep off social media? What’s cool to share? What’s not?
For the longest time, we have always had to grapple with the idea of social media oversharing, and trying to contain the festering desire in people to go beyond the lines of reason while putting aspects of their lives out there.
Naira Marley was arrested alongside Zlatan Ibile and few others [Credit -Instablog9ja]
In Naira Marley’s case, his use of social media to share his truth was not wrong. You can’t deny the man the opportunity of expressing himself with social media which we all use in the same manner. It was the message that he was propagating which was problematic.
In the said video, Naira was being an online fraud apologist, literally cussing out everyone who has a thing against Yahoo Yahoo fraudsters [actually, it was a subliminal clip directed at Simi who had previously released a clip condemning Internet fraud]
Of course, except you have been living under a rock, you must have heard what came after that video.
Once the clip hit the popular blogsites and got cross-posted to other social media pages like Facebook and Twitter, it became a serious topic of conversation. There was outrage from some quarters, and then there were people actually rooting for fraudsters to be left alone because ‘there are no jobs,’ ‘the government is not helping people and these people have no option but to turn to defrauding people home and abroad.’ The list of justifications were numerous, as were the expressions of rage and shock that people would support crime in that manner.
Naira went a step further to release a song and a music video on the subject, which featured Zlatan Ibile. Not long afterwards, EFCC gets involved, arrests the two singers along side few others. Long story short, Zlatan has been let out on bail but not Naira Marley, who has now been slammed with an 11-count charge and will now have his day in court soon.
Naira Marley, Zlatan Ibile have a song together, and were both initially arrested by the EFCC [Credit - Pulse]
If there is anything to learn from all of this, it is simple – be careful what you put on social media. It is not ‘just’ social media. People are getting jobs, meeting helpers, connecting with long lost friends and associates, finding love, pushing their business and making difference with social media. And then there’s Naira Marley getting arrested for creating problems for himself with what he posted.
That should tell you something, right? What you post on social media is actually a reflection of you. It tells us about you. Employers have been known to go through the social media accounts of potential employees before employing them. People have lost opportunities because of what social media influence. Just ask Kevin Hart who lost the opportunity to host the Oscars Awards because social media rallied against him for things he had tweeted in the past about gay people.
Kevin Hart could not host the Oscars because he tweeted stuff in the past which came back to haunt him [Credit - Getty]
Your social media posts are perceived as a reflection of you. So if you don’t want people to perceive you as something, don’t post it. Especially when your views on certain issues are really not in line with acceptable models of behavior in the society, you have to rein it in, get educated on the subjects before airing your views.
If you ever need something to look to when you need a reason to tweet or used the gram with sense and good reasoning, always remember Naira Marley who, without pressure from anyone, went and scored an own-goal that could potentially keep him locked out of the game for seven years.
Yikes!
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