The Dark Side of Social Media!

Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogspot just to name a few are all fun and games until people start to get nasty! Over the past couple of days, I’ve come across a few bloggers who have felt they had to defend themselves from something they’ve put on their Facebook pages. One mum apologised for ‘bragging’ about something great her children have done and another mum felt she had to defend herself as a ‘fit enough’ mother as she posted a photo of her three children sitting on her kitchen bench! What the?? Seriously people where is the nice positive energy that this already filled with hatred and filth earth needs!!!

I was completely taken aback when I was reading what these mums felt they had to say to clear their names of any misdoing! Last night I was reading a piece from one mum’s blog about how someone had left their condolences for the tragic accidental passing of her young son, but then went on to say how as parents we must never take our eyes off our children. She was guttered. She lives with guilt everyday but some despicable person had to lay judgement and make her feel worse! I’m an avid blogger and Facebook fan. It is my choice to put myself, my life, my thoughts and ideas out there to be judged and scrutinised, but one would hope that people would keep their negative comments to themselves. Thankfully for me, I have had nothing but positive feedback from my viewers and anyone who thinks otherwise has kept their comments to themselves! But obviously that’s not always the case for everyone….

Social media is such a huge part of most people’s everyday lives these days, which can be a good and bad thing, but it really comes with a dark side! I guess like anything it’s great when it’s all positive, but can leave someone feeling terrible when things start turning negative! It’s so easy for someone to leave a nasty comment or statement when they aren’t meeting face to face with people, but it still demonstrates how awful people can be! Quite often I’ll read something on Facebook or in someone’s blog post that I may not agree with, but I would never write anything that would leave a person feeling angry or upset…even if they don’t know me from a bar of soap! Sometimes things are best to be left unsaid!!!

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The group of people who often are an easy target is usually us mums! And most times it’s other mums having their negative opinion!! It seems to be the minute a parenting topic arises it opens up a can of worms for competition! Or the minute someone is beaming with pride and happiness, someone is swooping in telling them their bad luck story to drag them down – Facebook is so bad for this!!! When I read this week about the mum who apologised for always sharing good news stuff about her life because people left comments about how her ‘happy’ life made them feel bad – it made me think do people feel like that about me?!?! I’m one of those people who instagram, blog and Facebook all the great things that happen in my life!! I could post all the time about the negative stuff, but where would that get me?!?!? I know it takes all types for the world to go round, but it would be so nice if we could all be happy for each other when things are going right and support it each other when things are tough!

I guess the point of writing this blog post is certainly not to stir the social media pot (which is being done enough by a lot of people all over the world) but to post this in the hope that some of the people who don’t think before they comment read this and think twice next time! I know once we decide to post something on a social media forum we leave ourself open to judgement, but it would be nice to think that the good old fashion moral of ‘if you haven’t got anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all’ would apply! My biggest concern from this sort of thing happening now is that kids are jumping on the social media bandwagon younger and younger…like I said above, this world is already full of so much hate and filth, let’s all jump on the positive side of life…it’s so much nicer on this side!!!

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