Trolling, flaming, and the spreading of misinformation on social media, whether it’s done purposefully or accidentally, needs to be taken down a couple of notches. People who get a feeling of self-worth or comfort from schadenfreude really need psychological attention. It’s so easy to just poke fun at someone when you’re not face to face and it needs to stop.

Rude happenings on the internet occur way too much nowadays and people are not paying attention to what kind of effect it’s having on our society. The anonymity of the internet gives people this mask that makes them feel invincible, letting them heckle, berate, and spread all the misinformation they want since they can, in a sense, just step away from it without any heavy repercussions to themselves. But what they don’t understand is that there is someone on the other side of the screen, either losing self-esteem and hating themselves or ingesting the filth rude people spew and regurgitating it like some kind of sick recycling machine. What ends up happening to the victim is they either wind up losing it and going on a tirade of their own on a social media website or they walk away from it all, leaving those who cannot walk away from such abuse and those who choose to sit and wallow in the toxicity of it all.

Trolls and people who go around spreading hate on the internet deserve to all be lumped into one subset of the internet and just left to their own devices. It’s gotten so bad that people have actually killed themselves over the trolling and flaming that is so prevalent over the internet. Look up cyber-bullying and you will find some shocking stories.

It’s even worse for those who spread misinformation. When someone hears Jackie Chan has died for the hundredth time, they probably do one of the following: believe it and start spreading the news like wildfire, or start to lose faith in everything they hear, thus never trusting anything they hear online. All because some guy decided to get his rocks off by making a quick post about it. Or some poor fool somehow misheard news and haphazardly threw it up on their Facebook timeline without bothering to fact-check. It’s understandable that you’re not going to check the source on everything you post, but at least be aware that other people may share the same information; if that information is false then you’re practically spreading lies around yourself. This is detrimental because the internet is an amazing place to consume information, so long as it’s properly sourced and the facts are straight.

I understand that trolling and the sometimes accidental or deliberate spread of misinformation may not be the biggest problem at the moment. But technology and social media are what a large portion of the world uses to communicate at such a grand level. Why send hate to someone who lives thousands of miles away, when you can spend time learning about what makes them tick? Figure out what kind of things you have in common instead of hating them for the trivial things you don’t.