IS SOCIAL MEDIA TO BLAME FOR OUR POST-TRUTH WORLD?
Post Truth Politics! Just think about it. We no longer live in a world where facts was the sole weapon for finding out the truth. We no longer live in a world where collecting facts was the sole strategy that led us to come to a final conclusion on what to believe about specific situations. Seriously, what the hell has this world come to? Professionalism is slowly diminishing to the point where more and more people choose to live based on purely emotion and majority subjective opinions instead of having an emotional response based on what the facts are and what the truth actually is. But can we really blame social media for the post truth society we have become? Hell yeah!
Now I will digress that history has always had some sort of Post Truth towards not just politics but everyday life as well. However, we didn’t have social media back then so we did not have a platform to bitch about our “feelings” and get triggered over every little thing. There have always been liars, people who bend the truth at other’s expense, conspiracies, scandals and misguided opinions. However I feel like social media has given us the tools to make things worse and spread twisted truths to turn rational people into stupid naive monkeys who will believe anything that looks too good to be true.
Think of politics and Post truth effect as a flame that is super difficult to put out. The flame’s job is to cause havoc and create chaos. However, Order, facts, rationality and common sense represents the force keeping that evil flame contained. As long as the strategic control doesn’t go weary, nothing bad will happen that often. However, social media comes into the picture and represents the gasoline. You pour gasoline into an already-hard-to-control flame and the fire is going to rise (no pun intended) and swallow up everything in its path.
The recent election with Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton was a chaotic one, but it was dripping of post truth vibes. For example, Donald Trump; while Trump was a man known for being a horrible man and a poor choice to be President, there were times where some sites took snippets of Trump’s speeches and modified them to make him sound a lot worse than it actually was. As for Hilary…well if I actually have to go into detail about why she was also a bad candidate (i.e. wanting war, being a liar, etc) than I’m sorry to say you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years.
The sad truth about the internet is that while it has become the beacon of information and many truths, it is also the platform of propaganda and a tool for others to modify evidence to make it look like hardcore facts. It has become hard to separate the actual truth with modified lies and because we live in a “privileged” society where people are too lazy and uninterested to dig deep for the actual truth, they choose to take what is being passed off as truth and accepting it while also letting emotion drive our decisions on what to think instead of just thinking for ourselves.
