The most underrated benefit of these talk shows is that they allowed us to mentally separate real news from the rabble-rousing of some sexist asswad or neo-Nazi train wreck. Social media, however, is a mesh of both. Legitimate news events mingle with hate click lures like this dickheaditorial:

nypost.com

Written by a random film critic, this turd assessment amassed thousands of angry shares and countering blog posts, despite the majority of the adult population needing no explanation to why the article can suck a shit. In other words, the Internet has turned everyone into a daytime talk show audience, furiously spinning our wheels in anger over whatever douche of the week fills the mic with their inane opinion. Websites like the NY Post host this low-hanging ad revenue under the half-cocked excuse of "practicing free speech." A method now mastered by the black belt in pretending to care about the 1st Amendment: fucking Thought Catalog.

thoughtcatalog.com

thoughtcatalog.com

thoughtcatalog.com

Back in the day, Thought Catalog articles would have been stellar Springer brawls. The kind where everyone would chant Steve Wilkos' name while some Klansmen got stool-pegged in the junk. These are the money-gobbling hate trains kids enjoyed during sick days off from school -- the only problems being that they're now indistinguishable from everything else out there, and bafflingly elicit rebuttals from the same source.

thoughtcatalog.com

thoughtcatalog.com

thoughtcatalog.com

Holy balls. By pretending to value "all sides" of a story, Thought Catalog has effectively created the first perpetual outrage machine. But the same way no one goes around debunking National Enquirer stories, some lunatic's racist rant about Asians doesn't need a reasoned response any more than a rabies-soaked possum needs to be invited to a tea party.

Let's do another one! Hey parents! Didja hear about this terrifying teenage hashtag craze called ...

thelocal.fr

... "attempted suicide"? Damn that newfangled social media!

Teenagers have been doing wack shit since time was invented. But thanks to the Internet, never before have pubescent jackasses been given such a vast platform for lighting their balls on fire and snorting Benadryl on camera. And instead of brushing it off as malarkey, the media used this as yet another well for easy outrage clicks. Even corporations are jumping on board -- like in the case of the recent film The Gallows, which used a fake demon summoning craze to piggyback their film marketing. Because these stories have never been about helping teenagers, but rather selling (and thus amplifying) their anguish like Roman pimps.

According to this Jezebel article, one of their editors was refused a neck tattoo because the artist was sexist and thought she couldn't handle it ... as opposed to the easily Googlable fact that inking around someone's primary arteries is an extremely common request for tattoo artists to refuse. But instead of reasoning that out, the writer decided to go for the scorched earth approach and end on a slideshow mocking the artist's work on completely uninvolved strangers:

millihelen.jezebel.com

The artist in question later explained all of this for another site, which didn't stop Jezebel from adding zero corrections to the still-published complaint piece. After all, it's really just one person's word against the other -- raising the question as to what any part of this story accomplishes, besides satisfying the part of our brain that likes killing things with rocks. Same goes for this garbage:

vox.com

That's from Vox, a cutting-edge news site best known for being pathologically incorrect about everything. They gave a voice to some college professor proclaiming fear of liberal students because of a single anonymous and unspecified complaint he got in 2009. That's seriously the basis for this vague 3,000-word rant about how he's scared to bring up abortion and junk, based on random anecdotes and a hardcore persecution paranoia.

Then it was shared 270,000 goddamn times. Not because it contained any hard data about students in America, but rather because it justified an already believed narrative about overly PC college students. Meanwhile, the counter article got only 19,000 shares. Because no one likes reading that there isn't a problem with kids today.

Goddamn it, Jezebel. In case you're wondering, the choice to blur the tearful mugshot was mine, and not the site that apparently thought it was fun to make a young girl's stupid shoplifting crime a national chuckle farm for easy clicks. Because it's not like anyone else did stupid shit when they were 18.

deathandtaxesmag.com

I blurred that one, too. Hey, question: Is any of this news? Because it sure feels like nothing but making fun of heretofore anonymous people with problems in order to swell traffic. At some rung in the ladder to Hell, someone on the Internet realized that instead of making up fake scandals about celebrities, you could simply scroll through The Smoking Gun and local news sites until you found a real scandal by some soon-to-no-longer-be-random rando. And like that, with a little mocking pizazz, you could ruin a complete stranger's life from the comfort of your home office, blog newsroom, or Daily Mail lie dungeon.

dailymail.co.uk

That there came from Daily Mail finding a random guy crashing a Christmas sleigh, fabricating the part about him being drunk, and creating a viral sensation that swept the web. All at the low, low cost of completely ruining the driver's life back in his hometown. Because thanks to the Internet, what used to be a page six article in your local paper is headlining Facebook. And if you think you're somehow immune, consider this:

gawker.com

Like you, I was fascinated with the Rachel Dolezal story ... up until I realized that the race-swapping woman who barely committed a crime or broke any rules quite clearly came from an insane family drama which had nothing to do with me. In other words, these people are fucking loons, and we gave them their own Today Show special.

Why? What the fuck is wrong with us? Since when did a Jay Leno Headline sketch become a national conversation?

Fuck that guy. Not because his technique didn't work to improve the kid's behavior, but rather because it did, making his proof of concept one more cobblestone on the shame-wagon trail. Here's another one the media ticker-taped to death:

opposingviews.com

Way to set an example, "no-nonsense dad"! What a brave, brave ...

news.com.au

... neo-Nazi. He's a neo-Nazi.

See, whether you agree or condemn these shaming tactics, these are still random strangers' lives we're butting into. We don't know shit about these people. Case in point:

jezebel.com

nydailynews.com

Remember that one? The above headlines were enough for the rallying public to call for the father's arrest for brutally shaming his daughter. The only snag being that this story is 100 percent false, as the police would later determine that her dad never even posted the shaming video to begin with (it was her friends, after she died) ... and that it had nothing to do with her motivations anyway.

Turns out this all started when a local blogger dared to ask the hard questions about why the police weren't looking into a random YouTube video, and concluded that it must have caused her suicide without any evidence to back it up. The rest of the media took the idiot ball and ran with it before the police had a chance to do their jobs and actually determine the cause. And so there we all were, yelling at a grieving man for something he didn't do. And of course the blogger refuses to apologize for his actions, claiming that he never misled anyone with this innocent little headline:

tacomastories.com

Because "citizen journalism" means never having to say you're a wrong dickhead.

That kid had a history of physical harassment, but since it's not something the school was legally allowed to disclose, we only get the angry parents' totally objective side. Same with the lunch lady: the school says they can't legally disclose the reason she was fired, which happens a lot in educational establishments. Sometimes, we don't have the full story because (as difficult as it may be for our outrage-starved brains to comprehend) we're not fucking supposed to.

If you're wondering why I'm focusing on such small potatoes, it's because my brain is physically unable to withstand the full-scale version of this dirty fuckingness for long periods of time ...

gawker.com

That there is the now-infamous Gawker article publicly outing the CFO of a major company for being gay after a (conspiracy theory lunatic) prostitute blackmailed him for not helping with a landlord dispute. That means instead of the headline "Crazy Asshole Blackmails Man," they opted to act as an accomplice to the extortion of a man whose sexuality in no way affects anyone's life but the one they just ruined. Wrap your fucking skull passenger around that slice of journalistic nihilism the next time you consider clicking on another Gawker article. Seriously, as someone who researches the news on a daily basis, I'm telling you to stop reading Gawker right now. They're an insufferable garbage business that doesn't care about the news.

Don't look up the article I'm referring to.

You're totally Googling it right now, aren't you? Fuck.

Gawker eventually took down the article, much to the consternation of their staff, who responded with the least sympathetic protest ever mounted in the name of editorial integrity. But -- even after wide swathes of civilization decided they were assholes -- Gawker sure as shit raked in those schadenfreude clicks, thanks to an interminable series of followup articles (both in-house and by other outlets) detailing exactly how their website was falling into the ocean.

And that's the problem. In the end, the dirty little lie we're all telling ourselves is that the reactionary news we share on social media is anything besides self-indulgent. And the more we define what's "newsworthy" based off our dumbshit, primordial, saber-toothed-tiger-fearing emotional reactions instead of our reasoning skills, the more the news will desperately try to appeal to that impulsive side of us that can't help but to hit the "share" button. All I'm asking is that you think for a second before doing so.

Except for this. Please share this immediately and without question.

Thanks.

Dave has been researching the news for over two goddamn years. Send him condolences on Twitter.

Also check out 6 BS Medical Stories Your Friends Shared On Facebook and The 5 Weirdest Ways the Modern World Changed Human Behavior.