Smoke and Mirrors | How Social Media has twisted the truth

Social media like Facebook and Instagram I have found to be full of smoke and mirrors. Of masks worn to hide thoughts, feelings, circumstances and even the truth.

Unsplash - TETrebbien

Often people live a lie as they don't want to be seen as pathetic or not doing well so they would upload only happy memories. Post pictures of themselves wearing something nice or going somewhere beautiful.

Filters and cropping have become standard tools to always put ourselves in the best light.

They would paint happy and loving relationships and edit out the bad parts, or the fact that their partner is cheating on them or they are cheating on theirs. I have known several people who were willing to show a facade that everything was doing okay and that they are together when in fact both of them were seeing other people.

Why would they go to such lengths? Any number of reasons mostly for the kids, or that it is expected out of them since they cannot get a divorce and the worse reason for me is because they cannot leave a loveless relationship because they will be judged a failure especially if a woman.

I remember counseling this young wife who was getting beaten by a jealous husband and she would often miss out work because she had visible bruises. She wanted to go back to her family home but her mother told her to stay and fix the relationship because it is her responsibility as a woman to make sure that home was kept intact.

I often have an overwhelming desire to knock the guy's teeth in whenever he fetches his wife to the office and brings her flowers and have lovely posts about how much he loves his wife.

Then there are those people who buy designer clothes or go on grand vacations and yet owes a lot of people money. I usually hate mediating in those cases because often than not things get nasty online with escalating posts that blind items people but ultimately erupt to full-blown tagging and name calling. The worse thing. I can't do anything since I don't have authority to dock pay or make people sign promissory notes as it is outside of company jurisdiction.

Unsplash - Kayla Velasquez

Then there is the proliferation of fake news. Spin doctors and Social Media managers are raking in the money in terms of getting their service to be paid by the highest bidder.

With almost everyone wired to one form or another of social media getting viral and shared again and again is what most people want to do. This is where these individuals who have studied patterns and moods of people to know what kind of psychological triggers will be used to come up with the wanted results.

One of the dark agendas of such entities is the spread of fake news meant to destabilize, create confusion or undermine authority or reputation of targetted individuals, institutions or even governments.

Social Media is just full of this from FUD news attacking Cryptocurrency and the Blockchain technology to pregnancy gossips and recruitment campaigns for terrorist groups.

In both Philippines and US elections there were clearly manipulation and censorship that happened that painted one party in a better light while casting fake news and gossip to another.

Social Media has the capability to control the information it shows to people and Facebook even admitted to conducting mood alteration studies of users.

One of the stupidiest fake news that I remember was that shared post that on a certain date if you did not share or post that on your wall it would give Facebook to use and own all images and post in your profile to do as they see fit. I remember seeing so many people doing that even Facebook issued a memo denying that it sent such a message (we know Facebook you already scanned and collected that)

Unsplash - Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦

The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Facebook with allegations of acquiring the data of people and unwittingly the data of their friends as well in order to profile and build models that would influence people by putting in their feeds certain ads that would push their buttons.

Anyone that has used Facebook to recruit knows this is an easily obtainable service that costs cheaper than traditional media or advertising with a better market scope.

You can easily configure target demographic, area, age and even social background and choose the sponsored ads that will appear.

Social Media is one of the best leads generations tools marketing uses. The amount of information that people are willing to divulge in Social media apps is unbelievable.

Even third-party app develops got into the action by creating those fun quizzes that will scan your profile and pictures and tell you what country you should live in or what famous star you closely resemble and we freely give our consent!

Armed with that information they can sell it to whoever wants it for whatever purpose and we gave the keys to it.

Is it worth it to give our information for a chance to post a picture or describe our day?

Google is even worst because it keeps a track of all our searches and websites we go to so you can just imagine the amount of data it has on us.

I wouldn't be surprised if one day we will have a social rating system based on all information gathered from us and can either be good or very bad for us.

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