Following a natural disaster or an act of terrorism, social media is awash with thousands and sometimes millions of meaningless tweets and posts. It seems that the masses instead of helping or ignoring a tragic event, would rather post an empty gesture like a “prayer” before getting on with their everyday lives. Surely if these people actually gave a toss they would be so emotionally affected that Twitter would be the last thing on their mind, and if these twats genuinely cared wouldn’t they go to the area affected and do something to help? Nah, just copy and paste a contrived sentence that includes the latest attention-seeking hashtag and then go back to taking selfies.
Hashtags like #PrayForOrlando and #PrayForParis pop up almost instantly after a “shocking” newsworthy event and yet scroll through the timeline and you’ll see some of the most moronic pointlessness ever to be posted. Regardless of whether there’s been a shooting, a bombing, a war, or an earthquake, there’ll be a plethora of similar tweets with essentially the same sentence; “My thoughts and prayers are with so and so…” or “My heart goes out to the people of such and such…”. With such similar and contrived posts all over social media it becomes clear that the majority of people are subservient and spiritless – the tweets should read “I don’t really care but I don’t want to look like I don’t really care”.
Worse than a hollow tweet there’s also people hijacking these hashtags for narcissistic purposes…
https://twitter.com/ZariaNicole/status/743688111515852801And don’t forget to plug your product in a clever and deceptive way…
Never have I see such conformist and shamelessly conceited people than those on social media, and celebrities are some of the worst offenders. But seriously, does anybody really care what a crappy breakfast DJ or the Fifty Shades Of Grey author has to say about a recent tragedy like the assassination of Jo Cox for example? What connection do they have to the MP, did they know her or support her before she was killed? If the answer is no, then keep your fleeting grief to your fake-arse self.
Having said that, I can understand how a celebrity might feel pressured into tweeting something meaningless so not to offend the greater public. Following the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando there was the most idiotic hashtag #NickisHomophobicParty (which now seems to have conveniently disappeared) with people labelling Nicki Minaj a homophobe simply because she failed to tweet something about the Orlando shooting. It seems that the public want fakery masquerading as emotional rather than genuine heartfelt comments and opinions. Thanks to this judgemental atmosphere, we have everybody (famous and non-famous) rushing to post some clichéd and worthless sentence about a recent news story, not because they care, but because they don’t want to be ridiculed by the sheeplike masses.
Alongside television networks like NBC and E! placing the latest bogus overlay such as the Orlando-ribbon onto all their shows, and people on Facebook changing their profile image to include the latest meretricious tragedy-related flag over their smug mug, these feigned tweets are part of the ever-increasing insincere bullshit that plagues both social and broadcast media.
These days, nothing says “you don’t care” like a tweet saying you care. I guess a few emojis and a couple of hollow sentences are enough for the public to feel okay about moving on with their uneventful lives.
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WHAT WENT WRONG WITH...? 
This is too true. People post these statuses then move on straight away. Even more bullshit is when people change their profile pictures to multi coloured or white, western country flags. But when people die in brown/black countries, there is no option to change profile pictures to those flags. Worse still is when I saw my friend’s facebook status about donating money to a charity, and she wrote something like “not only do you get to help people, you get to feel good about yourself too”. WTFFFFF!!
Exactly. A slightly different topic, but that brings up the issue of fake charity in general – most cases of social media “charity” is all about people’s ego. If you’re truly altruistic then you do it privately, you don’t brag about it online. Just look at Kylie Jenner giving a kid $100 for lemonade, but not before she filmed it and uploaded it to Snapchat – self-promoting, attention-seeking bullshit…
Stop Kony arguably has to be worst of them all. I hate that fact people watch or read a small clip/article and believe they have an adequate understanding of what’s going on. Nothing is put into context anymore, you’re either on the bandwagon opinion or you’re against it (a hater, racist, homophobe blah blah).
Social media is a gift and a curse. It may allow you to communicate with your friends everywhere, but it is the frontrunner for narcissism and self-promotion, especially Facebook. Pretentious posts, excessive amount of selfies, fake ass charity, likewhores, and worst of all, changing your profile picture to a national flag after a tragedy. This happens every time a Western, predominantly white country is attacked. After the mass shootings in Paris, Brussels, and Orlando, people changed their profile picture to the designated flag. But there were also two major attacks in Turkey, first in Ankara and later in Istanbul. There was also an attack on a hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia. There was a shooting in Lahore and a bombing in Baghdad. What do the attacks have in common? The attacks happened in predominantly brown/black, non-Western, Muslim countries. What was the response from the masses? Nearly absolute silence. People just looked at this tragedies and ignored them as if it isn’t worth it. But when a madman drove a truck into a crowd of people and killed more than 80 people in Nice,France (Predominantly white, Christian, and Western), people yet again was on their bullshit. It is not about which tragedy is the worst. My argument is why we have a selective morality when it comes to tragedies.