Did social media ruin us, or simply reveal us?

Is society actually getting worse, or are we just more aware of the bad things because of social media? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Sometimes I genuinely feel like people are becoming colder. The way people treat each other these days can be shocking. But then I also wonder if people have always been like this and we just didn’t have a front-row seat to everybody’s life before social media. Think about it. Years ago, someone could be abusing their partner at home and nobody outside that house would know. A child could be getting bullied or abused and adults around them might dismiss it as “children being children.” Someone could be exploiting their workers, cheating customers, stealing from people or treating others horribly, and it might never go beyond their immediate environment. Now? Someone can record a 30-second video and suddenly thousands or millions of people know what happened. You wake up and see a video of a stranger being beaten. Another person is filming someone who is clearly having the worst day of their life instead of helping them. A student gets bullied in school and the whole thing ends up online for entertainment. Someone’s private relationship problem becomes public gossip because one person decided to post screenshots. A woman is being abused by her partner and people in the comments are arguing about what she “must have done” to deserve it. Someone loses their job or business and instead of people showing compassion, others are laughing because “life happens.” Someone makes a mistake once and the internet decides they deserve to be dragged forever. And then there’s the way people behave online because they know they’re behind a screen. People will say things to strangers online that they would never have the courage to say face-to-face. They insult people's looks, families, bodies, marriages, children, accents, jobs and entire existence over something as small as a disagreement. Sometimes I see comment sections and I'm like… are we okay? 😭 But here’s where it gets confusing. Social media has also helped expose things that people used to get away with. Victims of abuse can speak up. People can expose corrupt behaviour. Scams can be identified before more people fall victim. Missing people can be found because their pictures spread quickly. People who were once isolated can find communities that understand them. Someone living in a small town can share their talent and suddenly have opportunities they never would have had access to before. There are people who have received medical help, scholarships, jobs, donations and even justice because their stories reached the right people online. So clearly, social media isn't just making society worse. It is also making society more visible. Maybe that's the real difference. We didn't suddenly wake up one morning and become cruel. Maybe humans have always had selfishness, greed, jealousy, violence and wickedness in them. The difference is that now we have cameras everywhere. Before, you heard about one terrible thing happening in your community. Now you can see ten terrible things before breakfast. Someone is fighting in Lagos. Someone is being robbed in Abuja. Someone is being bullied in a school somewhere. Someone is exposing a cheating partner. Someone is crying about how their family treated them. Someone is showing how their employer exploited them. Someone is being publicly humiliated. Someone is being praised. Someone is being cancelled. Someone is being defended. Someone is being destroyed. And you're seeing all of it from the comfort of your bed. After a while, you start wondering if humanity itself is deteriorating. But maybe we're just overwhelmed by how much of humanity we're exposed to. And there's another thing that worries me. When we constantly see horrible things, do we eventually become desensitized to them? If you see someone being humiliated every single day online, do you eventually stop feeling shocked? If every day there's another story about someone being killed, abused, scammed or betrayed, do you eventually just scroll past it? If people are constantly turning serious situations into jokes for engagement, does that slowly change what we consider normal? Because sometimes I think social media doesn't necessarily create bad behaviour. It can simply reward it. The louder the outrage, the more engagement. The more controversial the opinion, the more comments. The more embarrassing the story, the more shares. The more shocking the video, the more views. So people start doing things not because they're good or right, but because they know people will watch. And that's scary. But at the same time, maybe we're romanticising the past. People often say, “Things were better in our time.” Were they really? Or were we simply children who didn't understand everything happening around us? Maybe our parents saw things we never knew about. Maybe there were people suffering silently. Maybe there were victims nobody believed. Maybe corruption, abuse and exploitation were happening all around us, but there was no algorithm constantly pushing the evidence into our faces. Maybe society wasn't necessarily better. Maybe we were just less informed. And honestly, I don't know which one is worse. A society where terrible things happen but nobody knows about them… or a society where terrible things happen and everybody knows, but sometimes nobody cares. So I'm curious. Do you genuinely think people are becoming worse? Or has social media simply removed the curtain and shown us what has always existed? And if social media disappeared tomorrow, do you think society would actually become better… or would we simply stop seeing the ugly parts of it? I really want to hear different opinions on this one.

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