I go on social media sometimes. It’s a bad habit, but hey. Nobody lives up to their ideals all the time.
One of the worst types of post I routinely encounter is the “check out what this jerk thinks” post. It’s usually a screenshot of some anonymous social media user airing some hateful or otherwise awful opinion.
Maybe we should collectively knock this off. These posts are the equivalent of recreationally drinking whatever that chemical is that they put on Nintendo Switch cartridges so kids don’t swallow them. I don’t want to know that literally just some guy doesn’t like human rights.
- It’s important to know when your elected officials or the CEO of a culture-shaping mega corp is a bigot. It’s not important to know this about SportsFan12345.
- Nobody learns anything by contributing to a thread about how yes, that guy is a big jerk.
- The person getting dunked on isn’t going to learn anything, either. They probably aren’t even aware of your post, and if they are, then evidence suggests they’re just going to entrench.
Without going so far as to bury our heads in the sand and pretend festering social problems don’t exist, let’s stop deliberately surfacing the worst that the internet has to offer.
It used to be that we’d tell people “don’t read the comments.” “Don’t delve through the comments and build a display cabinet for the worst possible ones” should go without saying.
