Social Media Brings Out the Worst in People | Observations from a Photo that went Viral

Social Media Brings Out the Worst in People | Observations from a Dollar Tree Photo that went Viral

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to call it “Social Media Brings out the Worst IN People” or “Social Media Brings out the WORST PEOPLE”. I haven’t decided which it is yet. What do you think?

I recently posted the above photo to my Facebook page with this attached caption:

It’s not safe to just grab anything at Dollar Tree anymore! I was so excited to see this for $1.25 but quickly realized it was $3! (And this wasn’t a Dollar Tree/Family Dollar hybrid – it was just a Dollar Tree.)

And no, it wasn’t in a clearly marked “plus” section.

Watch yourselves and your wallets!

There is nothing unusual about that post in relation to the type of content I post. And the initial comments on it were from long-time page followers also lamenting that that picked up a bag of candy that didn’t have a price on it and it rang up $3.50 when they assumed it was $1.25. Or others echoing the same sentiment about higher priced items were “all mixed in” at their stores. Which was my whole point when I made the post.

Dollar Tree has long been a place where you didn’t have to look at price tags because you knew how much everything was – even with the increase to $1.25, you still knew that things were (or were supposed to be) $1.25.

That point was missed by a LOT of people.

And normally, I have to fight with Facebook and dance with their algorithms just to get them to show my posts to a mere fraction of my 13,000 followers. But this post, THIS ONE, they showed to over 700,000 people.

WHY, Facebook?!?!

Clearly, most of those 700,000 are not my intended target audience.

And, because it’s Facebook, of course, the comments got ugly.

Oh, yes, I must be SO stupid.

And I can’t read either.

Also, the United States is a very big place – I did not realize it would be difficult to understand that what is happening down the street from you isn’t the same as what is happening four states away. I clearly said in the post that this was NEW to the store I was in. But I’m the one that can’t read…

And the number of MEN (and I use that word loosely) that are rude, unkind, sarcastic jerks online to women is astounding. I’ve seen this on my personal Facebook feed in community group pages. A woman can’t ask a question without the “men” jumping on with stupid, unhelpful, and downright rude responses. That’s another post for another day but I saw the same on this post as well. Less than 5% of my followers are male but that didn’t keep the special ones from coming out on this post.

Later he came back and laughed at my response.

After 550+ comments, I decided to limit commenting to “established page followers” to weed out the riff-raff. When this upstanding gentleman discovered he couldn’t comment anymore, he took the time to send me a message. That’s commitment, folks.