I’ve been very wary and weary of social media of late. I’m looking at you, Facebook. Looking at the feed it’s generating for me, it has become a cesspool of vile hatred and a putrid petri dish of falsehoods propagated by the masses who love amassing likes and comments to feed their narcissistic needs. It may be argued that the origins are small in number but they are undoubtedly loud. I doubt Facebook would do anything much besides paying lip service to stem it as, let’s face it, it’s their revenue stream. The algorithms used to present the newsfeed to you are optimized for engagement. The more of which, e.g. rage inducing posts, means more revenue for them. One can attempt to put good postings or tweets out there to quell and calm the rage but the algorithm will render them less viral.
So, as much as I would like to get off the social media bandwagon, I must admit that I’m like any typical Malaysian who’d love nothing more than to rubberneck at the scene of an accident, but in this case, postings that are rife with wacky conspiracy theories and blatant misinformation. I do find them to be entertaining at times though. I just hope that people will still have enough grey cells to stop to think before they believe and before they share stuff.
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