Basic rule to observe in social media (Opinion)

We all spend a lot of time on social media both for fun and for work. For the physical world, most of us grew up receiving various instructions from parents and relatives on how to deal with people. You are told not to trust strangers, not to follow people you don’t know well into a lonely place, not to accept things from strangers, etc. We grew up more or less informed about risks we face in the street or the physical world. But we do not receive similar instruction in respect of the social media world.

Many of us still do not understand the social media world and the unique risks we face in it. In the physical world, like in the streets, you know you can be mugged, you can be robbed, you can be raped, you can be assaulted, you can be killed. Also, we are able to assess our unique disposition to certain risks, and prepare to avoid them. Example, a beautiful and attractive young woman knows not to work alone in a strange neighborhood. Also, in the physical world, we are conscious of time element to risk. Example, being out late in the night exposes you to more risks.

But in the social media world, not only are we unable to understand the unique risks we face, we are ill prepared to deal with those risks. The truth, however, is that we face even greater risks in the social media world than we do in the real world. Just as there are people out to harm you in the physical world, there are more people out to harm you more in the social media world. So, you really need to understand this and develop some means of protecting yourself.

The harms or dangers you face in the social media are not only that someone would scam you and obtain money from you or that someone will lure you with lies into a position where he can harm you physically. These kind of dangers are easily detectable these days. However, there is a type of danger you face in the social media which is difficult to detect. It has to do with emotional harm.

Your emotional wellbeing is very important and quite essential for your overall good health. We are all entitled to feel happy, contented and satisfied with our lives and to feel hopeful and confident about the future. If we often have to feel sad, angry, frustrated and restless and insecure about our lives and our future, we will not be in good health. Indeed, persistent emotional stress can reduce your life span and lead to early death.

So, the most harmful people to avoid in social media are those who make it their duty to make your life miserable and to take away your happiness. There are very many such people in the social media. Indeed, social media encourages such bad people to hide behind the anonymity of the social media to try to harm you. They derive pleasure in harming you. They roam around the social media looking for someone to harm. Such people are usually miserable and insecure people. They believe they can cure their own misery if they can make you miserable too.

I can give you example of this with my own experience. To protect some DPA Admins from some vicious emotional vampires, we decided to use the page name Rambo. We can direct DPA without allowing the vampires to reach our wives, husbands and children to harass them. So, whenever you read from Rambo, all you can be sure of is that you are reading from DPA Admins, but you cannot be sure the particular Admin. That way, we don’t feel personally hurt when the emotional vampires seek for blood to suck.

Yet, despite the fact that they don’t know for sure which Admin they are dealing with, the vampires will still leave the substance of the post and go for the person of the poster. They don’t know where the poster lives, but they try to assume he lives in Nigeria. They don’t know the educational and professional background of the poster, but they want to tell him that he is not an expert in this or that. But if you don’t know who the particular Rambo is, you have to agree that you really cannot tell about his expertise: you must deal only with the content of his post.

A good person will focus on what is on the post and determine whether it is true or false or reasonable or unreasonable. But the emotional vampire will ignore the post and focus on the poster, his tribe, his religion, whether he is a Democrat, where he lives, who he likes or don’t like and whether he might have accepted money to express a particular view. For instance, when you accuse me of having received money from APC or Buhari for the view I express or when you accuse me of supporting terrorism because I held the view that an American President needed Congressional approval to use military force or when you accuse me of hating Trump just because I disagree with his policy: when you do this, what do you think you are doing? You are just being an emotional vampire seeking to make me unhappy and to drain me emotionally.

How do you protect yourself against the emotional vampires on the social media? Avoid them at all cost. Don’t engage them. I am lucky to be an Admin in DPA. It means I don’t have to go to any other group to socialize. I can socialize here. And as an Admin I can effectively avoid a vampire without having to leave the stage for him.

Now you have to understand why I do not hesitate to eliminate any vampire I come across in this group. Once I detect that you derive pleasure in draining people emotionally, seeking to make them sad and miserable: once I detect that, I want to keep you far away from our group.

So, for all of you, learn to stay away from the vampires that roam around the social media. Never allow them to drain you emotionally. Never allow them to suck your blood. They will make you sad, miserable and sick. Throw them out. Don’t bother to argue with them.

In DPA, you can disagree with my view. You can disagree with my analysis. You can disagree with my conclusions. Your disagreement makes me happy. But once you leave my views, my analysis or my conclusions, and start focusing negatively on my personality, you are a distant history. We know what we are doing.