The safety of social media

In saying “safety” in the title, I’m referring to how easy it is for us to post on Facebook some meme where it attacks someone without having any need to be based in truth. It can just be our “opinion” even though it’s making a claim that is based is something that is factual. A recent one I saw was about Obama being good at lying and that Trump is good at telling the truth. The implication is that Trump is telling the truth and people don’t like to hear it. I added a comment asking for proof, and there were no responses to this. What I find happens most of the time is that people will post stuff like this and other followers won’t want to get involved so they won’t comment at all. But this has a different effect because the original poster thinks that if no one is comments or saying something to the contrary, they can easily say, “Yes, I am right and people are not fighting me on this because they know I am right.”

If I come at them with fact checking to show that Trump is more likely to say a false claim, they can use the label of “fake news” or that the media is making that up, so the conversation ends. But if we were sitting together and discussing this in person, it would be much harder for someone to just say that this is how it is because they would have to look someone if the eye who may be willing to challenge them on their “beliefs”. This is why social media is good for people who don’t want to be challenged. It doesn’t matter that my account shows that it is me who is the user, there is still some removal from myself there. Not just for me but for anyone. The more connected we seem to be, the more disconnected we actually are.