Reading my blog, you may suspect that I hate social media. I do. I believe that our freedom of speech is one of the most abused freedoms granted in our country. Social medial gives people the platform to slander, lie, and defame others. But the worst abuse is not from those writing posts, but from the folks that believe that crap. Social media, quite simply, brings out the worst in people; it brings out the unfiltered part of our psyche; the part that we should keep hidden from the world. I brings out our monster.
Lie + Social Media = New Truth
Watching the news is evidence that people have no filter. We have become a society that cannot discern fact from fiction. Worse, we are more likely to believe a lie than the obvious truth.
Social media provides a mechanism to boost our own self importance. We want to stand out and telling the truth just doesn’t provide the substance to become viral. So, we have to state outlandish things. People will believe them and will further spread the lie and future boost your online importance.
Animal welfare activists saw early on social media’s potential and exploited it. They could get people to believe anything that they said, because we became a society too stupid to discern the lie, even when the truth is so obvious. Social media became the means that our truth was whatever we posted. As others have said, “Social media was dumbing down America.”
People get so upset with foreign countries using social media to influence our elections, because we stupidly believe everything we read. If we could gain back a lick of sense, like we had before social media, we could easily see through the sham. If you want to find the truth, find someone who is not on social media.
We so desperately need to be heard and to be recognized, even if we have nothing to add to the subject. It really gets my goat when I am reading a product review and someone asks a question. To what end do you accomplish when you reply, “I don’t know.” These people cannot stand the silence and need to make noise, just to hear the noise.