When did social media become a battleground?

From Myspace Top 8s to strangers arguing via Facebook comments, the nature of social media has changed.

By LAUREN MOORMAN1851 Franchise Contributor

SPONSORED 10:10AM • 06/17/16

I fondly remember when social media was just becoming a thing when I was in grad school. I was an early adopter of Friendster and MySpace. I loved changing my sparkly background and song that played on my MySpace page. I loved indiscriminately changing my Top 8, scanning photos (with a SCANNER) to post on my page and writing nonsense posts on my friends’ profiles.

Then came Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat (which I still haven’t quite figured out) and probably dozens of other social media sites that I haven’t even heard of yet.

Over the years, I went from dedicated Facebooker, with multiple posts per day (including albums of photos documenting just about every single thing I did each day), to a once-a-week poster. Why?

Well, part of the answer is that I’ve grown up and no longer feel like I need to broadcast my every move to 1,000 people who I know in varying degrees ranging from “husband” to “person I literally met once, couldn’t pick out of a lineup and unfollowed years ago.”

I suppose I’ve shied away from Facebook in general because of the content that surfaces each day. If it isn’t someone ignorantly arguing with a stranger that has an opposing viewpoint, it’s someone posting a link to a GoFundMe campaign or a video of a neglected animal in need of adoption or surgery that its owner can’t afford.

To be clear, I don’t have any issue with people having an opposing viewpoint to my own. The problem for me, particularly in the last six months, has been people’s disrespectful, baseless arguments that they push on other people – often times strangers. To support their claims, people use links to articles on click-bait websites with domain names like xyzinternet.com and call it facts. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to try to change someone’s beliefs – and if you’re going to try, why does it have to get so ugly so quickly?

And at my age, and at this point in my life, I have a hard time being bombarded by ignorance and, honestly, by sad things, whether it’s an injured dog or breaking news of yet another Chicago murder. I don’t want to avoid the news, but I also don’t want to be immersed in heavy, serious topics every time I want a five-minute break to see what my friends are up to.

What happened to the bumper sticker app? Or innocent fun, like poking? Until I figure this out, I guess I’ll just stick to posting pictures of my healthy, happy, cute dog.