The moment Barack Obama was
officially projected as President on Tuesday, the floodgates opened up to a
barrage of posts all over social media sites.
A few we sampled on Facebook read
as follows:
"Thank you to the lazy and
ignorant for choosing a Communist to run our country again."
Or
"I'm taking the day off! No
reason to bust my hump for someone else."
And still others gloated
"The only thing I like more than
winning is not losing."
If you have a Facebook page,
chances are you've read posts like these or even worse. John David Harding sure
did.
"I had to block a lot of
friends," said Harding. "I had to delete a lot of friends because the
material was inappropriate."
Tina Ferry agreed and said there
is a fine line between expression and aggression.
"It's ok to voice your opinion
but it's not necessary to get so vicious one way or the other."
A trend that social media experts
believe is growing very quickly.
"What we're seeing is that a lot
of people think that their virtual presence doesn't have any consequences."
Jensen Moore is an assistant
professor of strategic communication at LSU and says angry posts fall under the
react first and think later category connected to social media sites.
"People are just saying things
off the top of their heads and they're not considering what their followers,
their friends their family think about it, they're just spewing," added Moore.
According to Moore, they are
spewing about topics that were once considered taboo like politics and that has
Ferry wishing sites like Facebook would return to less confrontational days.
"Yeah I'm looking forward to that
and pictures of their kids."
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