Why must we give people a verbal beat down online even for small transgressions? If someone misspeaks or days something unthinking, which let's face it, we all have done or will do at some point, people on social media have to go on angry attack. They pile on, get on the case to identify the person if the Internet doesn't know their name, give out their personal data, and pound them into submission. They want them to lose their reputations, jobs, homes, and even their lives in some cases,over things that in the overall scheme of things matter very little. What do we get out of doing that?
On social media we're cultivating a belief system than is unsupportable, a system in which we've come to believe our opinions matter in every situation and context and the exercise of our free speech is important and shouldn't be curbed or restrained in any way. We insert ourselves into conversations that really have nothing to do with us, and act as though all opinions are of equal value, when that is rarely the case. We opine at length on topics we have very little information on, make judgments, and broadcast them to the world. It's wrong, and it's a trend that needs to stop.
In the real world, there are slow news days, and that's a good thing. A slow news day means we did less damage to the planet, other humans and ourselves than usual. It means nothing got blown up, no one shot a slew of innocents, no one well known got arrested, no public utterances reached the level of outrageousness, and no major investigation yielded fruit. But there can be no such thing as a slow news day on social media. If nothing catastrophic has occurred once people wake up to a new day, social media will birth something to talk and obsess over. It could be a rehashing of a retired newsy bit, the exposure of an old post from a digging expedition, or the magnification and elevation of something minor but new in people's news feeds. The social media appetite, once whetted, must be fed daily and continuously. If there's nothing legitimately newsworthy, a trumped up issue will suffice. The bad thing about trumped up issues is while they may come and go quickly in social...
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