Pissing Me Off Currently: Facebook Memes

Everyone's got a poignant Facebook meme to back up their political, cultural, and religious opinion, don't they? If you have a relative on Facebook, especially an older relative that doesn't quite understand the phrase that we all learned growing up in the internet age, "Don't believe everything on the internet," you know what I'm talking about. The majority of us youngsters learned this lesson when our teachers in school would scold us for using Wikipedia as a valid source for anything- any asshole can make and change a Wikipedia page and that privilege extends all over the web.

With the rise of Facebook there has also been a rise of misinformation that spreads like wildfire over the pages of everyone's scared older relatives who think that the bottom of a cup at In-N-Out says "Hail Satan" and that gun statistics can be boiled down to a simple, easily digestible infographic with questionable sources that can be completely obliterated with a simple search on the Google machine. 

Call me an asshole but I don't let people get away with such things. Here's my order of thinking once I see one of these scaredy-cat memes:

1.) My initial reaction, "What? No- that's ridiculous, how can this be true?"
2.) Open another tab and enter a quick search on Google.
3.) Snopes, my old friend, there you are.
4.) No surprise, this meme is fucking false.
5.) Post link to the Snopes article without any other commentary. 
6.) Roll my eyes. 

Why does everyone take these statistics as truth when they come from a source as unreliable as the other dicks on Facebook?!

There is already much debate on the effects of Facebook and other social media and how these mediums are shaping our culture. In the past, if you wanted to find out if your neighbor was a racist or misogynist, you had to wait until you heard something mumbled under his breath or put your ear against his wall to see what you could overhear. Today, all you have to do is take a look at ones history on Facebook to see that he shared or liked something from the "White Pride" page.

Everything nowadays is a soundbite or a shared meme. They're all huge ideas boiled down into small, easily digestible and sharable parts. That's dangerous because it leaves no room for any nuance. It makes everything in our world a black or white issue. You're either Republican or Democrat, pro-choice or anti-choice, or Christian or Atheist. I think social media and the quick spread of ideas has caused our country and our world to become more divided. Our national discourse is at a third grade level and if you need any proof all you have to do is look toward the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. I think that's the most terrifying sentence I've ever typed in my life. And with that as our possible leader, a man with such thin skin that when offended he hurls insults like he's on the playground, it's only going to get worse.