Yesterday’s Events Suggest That Something Is Very Wrong With Social Media

I think it’s safe to say that you like everyone else on the planet are horrified about the murder of a TV reporter and a TV cameraman yesterday live on TV. Here’s what horrified me more. I found out about this scrolling through my Twitter feed and having a video that showed the murders take place auto play because someone decided to retweet it. The videos were there because the murderer created Facebook and Twitter accounts which he then used to not only live Tweet the murders, but post videos of him taken human lives and rant about various things that I will not get into here. In short, he didn’t want to take lives, he wanted to take lives in the most public way possible and make a statement.

Needless to say, I’ve turned off the auto play function in Twitter, and the person who retweeted the video was swiftly unfollowed by yours truly. But that does not address the real question. Have we as a society entered a “new normal” where murder is live cast on social media, and we as a society tolerate this as just being part of our social media feeds as well as retweet videos of the killing of innocent people? Because if that’s what we as a society have become, then I want off of social media.

I’m pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, and Biz Stone didn’t have this in mind when they came up with Facebook and Twitter. I’m also pretty sure that we as a society can do better. I would very much like to see us prove that.

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