Lol, no honestly, hear me out…
So, you’re reading an interesting article or post on Facebook and you feel compelled to comment on it and give your point of view. You are knowledgeable on the subject and you feel your comment could provide some value. You take the time to make sure it’s free of errors and that it makes sense and you hit reply. Later that day, you check up on your comment only to find, to your horror, that a handful of people have clicked on the laughing emoji. No, it’s not that they found the post funny or witty and they are laughing with you – no…they are laughing at you.
Is it just me? Am I the only one who finds this maddening?
I’m sure that wasn’t the intention when Facebook decided to give us a handful of emojis that we could use to indicate our feelings. There’s one for like, love, care, laugh, wow, sad, and angry. That pretty much covers 99 percent of human emotions, yet the laugh emoji serves more than one purpose. Yes, it’s great to have handy when someone posts something humorous, but people also use it to basically say, “You’re an idiot.”
Nowhere is this more prominent than in religious posts or political posts. Well, anywhere where you are likely to have very strong opinions and vastly different viewpoints. As a Canadian, I use the example of Justin Trudeau’s Facebook posts. No matter what he posts, he is attacked by people and their number one weapon is the laughing emoji. But it’s par for the course. Being a public figure (especially a political figure), you are bound to get negativity from members of the other camp.
What really bothers me is that I spend the time to make relevant, useful comments on posts that I consider important, only to be slighted by complete strangers who have no idea who I am. Why is this so upsetting? I mean, if they are complete strangers and have no idea who I am, shouldn’t I be able to let it go easily? It’s a funny quirk of our ego I suppose – a silly human trait.
Maybe it has more to do with the fact that I take things too seriously.
Again, having someone disagree with you online is not the same as dealing with it face to face. Still, it is frustrating.
But it isn’t just the laughing emoji on Facebook, is it?
Nowadays there are many opportunities for trolls to practice their craft. One of the biggest is Youtube. I honestly don’t know how content creators on Youtube do it. You would literally have to mentally shut down, ignore the trolls, and move forward if you ever wanted to get anything done – not to mention, you’d be a basket case listening to all the negativity. I know people who make videos and even though they don’t have a huge amount of traffic, they still struggle with nasty comments. And by nasty comments, I mean the worst of the worst where people will pick out some physical feature that may not be your best selling point and run with it. Chances are, it’s also something you are already very aware of and self-conscious about. But that’s the point – to cause maximum damage.
The bottom line is that social media is like the wild west at the moment and there is a good chance that you are going to meet with some negativity at some point. How you deal with it is really all that matters. Look at it this way: If you need some practice to build confidence, there is no better opportunity – lol.
