One reason to detest social media – as if you needed another reason – is the way it is used to blow tiny slights and small incidents into worldwide outrage.
When the exaggerated importance of singular incidents is coupled with the growing issue of fake news being treated as real by such media giants as Facebook, Twitter and Google, it’s easy to see why so many Americans have a distorted view of their country and the world.
The craziness may have peaked after the election, as everyone from president-elect Donald Trump to ultra-liberal college students used social media to tell the world how offended and victimized they felt.
For his part, Trump returned to Twitter with vengeance following the election.
On Nov. 10, he gave credence to an inaccurate claim that anti-Trump protesters were being bused to Austin for demonstrations. The Texan who initiated the fake protest tweet said later that he saw a lot of buses and figured they had been used to transport paid protesters to a nearby demonstration.
That wasn’t correct, but none of the thousands of people who passed along the bad info bothered to check. Only the mainstream media did.
For Trump, it was another chance to complain about being treated unfairly.
And he saw another the next week, when he used Twitter to repeatedly demand apologies because cast members of the Broadway hit “Hamilton” criticized Republicans’ policies in a statement from the stage after the show. The statement was directed at Mike Pence, vice president elect, who was in the audience and was booed.
Playing the role of the adult in the new administration, Pence reacted to the great hullabaloo by saying “Hamilton” was a great show and that he wasn’t bothered by the comments or the booing.
It is, he noted, what freedom looks like
Meanwhile, back on Twitter, Trump was suggesting that theater should be a place where political commentary is prohibited. And while he was at it, he blasted “Saturday Night Live,” a late-night TV comedy show, and wanted to know whether he would get equal time.
All this led to many social media posts and headlines at legitimate news outlets, questioning Trump’s grasp of history and the U.S. Constitution.
It’s not just the newly elected president who is ginning up angst and anger online.
It seems we are all supposed to be outraged by every anecdote that gets communicated through Facebook, Twitter or other outlets.
It’s as if every incident is worthy of national attention and outrage: every bigot who threatens a Muslim; every public official who posts racist insults about the Obamas; every liberal protester who steps on a flag; every act that is – or is perceived as being – a slight to military personnel or their families.
Recently, an angry Trump supporter who didn’t get his coffee fast enough at a Starbucks near Miami, Fla., started yelling at a Starbucks employee, claiming she refused to serve him because he was a white man who voted for Trump.
Someone in the store caught his tantrum on video and put it on social media. He then complained that people were harassing him because of the video.
Such incidents are turned into events that are supposed to symbolize trends or values among large segments of Americans.
They do no such thing.
They are simply anecdotes.
They might be indicative of larger trends, but without more research, more reporting and more analysis, no one knows.
For the most part, mainstream media and the public are still figuring out how to responsibly use social media. It’s clear that it has become a major source of information. It’s just as clear that it’s not reliable.
Making sense of news in a world where anecdotes and oddities are conflated into national issues is tough. That’s especially true when there’s an overload of information, and much of it is inaccurate.
All of us need to get better at discerning between the trivial and the important, the trend and the anecdote, the real and the fake.
Otherwise, all the “news” flying around social media will just distort our view of the world rather than help us better understand it.
A Plains View 