Will 2017 be a smarter year for stupid social media users?
The year 2016 was a terrible one. But all that was nasty with 2016, all that was wrong, was also amplified by social media. It was as if all social media users collectively switched off their brains and just shouted incoherently into the great virtual void, which somehow ended up echoing into the real world.
It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact impact social media had in 2016. Some say it helped Donald Trump win because Facebook users liked and spread sensational fake news. Some say it led to several outrages over things that just weren’t true.
How much of that was superfluous or real is something experts will tell, but there is no doubt that social media users acted and behaved rather dumbly in 2016.
People just lost all sense of rationality on their Facebook pages, in their WhatsApp groups and on Twitter. They liked and shared everything that fit in their make-believe narrative, even if it was senseless, illogical or plain dumb.
Imagine how many shared, and totally believed, that the new Rs 2,000 note had a GPS chip embedded in it. It was preposterous, yet it trended.
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| Some say social media helped Donald Trump win the US election. |
In fact, people on social media believed all sorts of wrong things. If someone posted a replica of a dinosaur with Steven Spielberg posing in front of it, people believed that a dinosaur had been killed. Many replied: “RIP dinosaur, what kind of monster people will kill it?”
Although this happened in 2014, the year 2016 was no different. And this was exploited well by those who sought to create some ruckus. Photos that belonged to someplace else were shared to represent something else, in most cases riots, terrorist attack, war scene, etc.
People were killed and then resurrected again on Facebook and Twitter, while ludicrous messages were shared widely through WhatsApp.
This made 2016 messier than it actually was. In a world where a lot of things are going wrong, if there is also a sudden oversupply of misinformation and stupidity, it just makes the whole picture look particularly nasty. And this, let’s hope, we can avoid in 2017.