5 Stupid, Stupid Ways Social Media Is Destroying The World

What makes these sites attractive is that they're secluded and peaceful, but that also means they are not equipped for 40,000 people to show up overnight. That's not an exaggeration. It used to be unusual to see someone who wasn't one of the couple hundred locals hiking the trail at Kanarraville Falls in Utah, but thanks to a social media explosion, 40,000 people visited in 2015. It caused a number of disasters, including damaging the water system of the whole town of Kanarraville because people kept walking on the water line.

Ironically, the number of people visiting a site can destroy what made it popular in the first place. A part of the Colorado River called Horseshoe Bend used to see maybe 1,000 visitors per year. In 2017, it topped 4,000 per day, necessitating the construction of a parking lot to the tune of over $200,000 to accommodate the traffic. They literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

You would think this kind of thing would stop after exactly one case because the offender would be thrown in all of the jail, but it's sort of complicated. Lots of people think skipping out on jury duty is no big deal, and while they're totally wrong, people are worried that those selected will be even more likely to fail to report if they think they'll be harshly punished for scrolling through Facebook when a murder case gets boring. If you have a solution, make sure you pass it on to a judge, because they're out of ideas.

Not that judges are totally blameless here. Apparently feeling that she didn't have the platform she deserved despite sitting on a platform at the front of the court, Ohio judge Shirley Strickland Saffold began posting comments about her own cases under the username "Lawmiss" on a local newspaper's website. When this was discovered, she was asked to recuse herself from a specific case, but she refused, bringing the proceedings to a grinding halt until a higher court ordered her to fuck entirely off. Then she sued the newspaper that broke the story for $50 million. The moral of the story is that you do not want to legally step to a judge, no matter how obviously wrong they are.

It turns out that's a bad idea too. (Staying off social media, not water-skiing lab rats. Those are objectively awesome.) A poll of over 2,300 hiring managers found that nearly three out of four screened applicants' social media, and 57% said they were less likely to call someone in for an interview if they had no such accounts. They like knowing as much as possible about a candidate beforehand, but they also assume that anyone who doesn't have an online presence these days must have some water-skiing lab rats in their closet.

Since "less likely" to get an interview can often mean no chance, this can be a make-or-break career choice for highly competitive jobs and industries. You could always set up an account and not use it, except unused social media pages are also considered red flags. Unless you have superhuman self-restraint, there's no winning. Might as well warm up the tiny lil' speedboats.

The internet runs on schadenfreude as much as it does on electricity, but it's easy to forget that a dumb kid who made a mistake is not the same as an adult going on a racist rant in a Starbucks. That adult has a fully formed prefrontal cortex and no excuse, but public humiliation can permanently rewire a child's brain. The consequences can range from lifelong psychological problems to leaving them open to predators on the internet looking for vulnerable kids.

And the knowledge that such humiliation was at the hands of a parent, the person they should be able to trust most in the world, makes it exponentially worse. There are around 35,000 kids now dealing with this kind of trauma, but hey, at least we got to laugh at their funny haircuts.