It just takes five minutes of absent-minded following of the comments posted by people beneath the live feed of the daily briefing by Health Chief Charmaine Gauci on the Television Malta Facebook page to realise what kind of society we live in.

We would gladly avoid doing such an exercise, but our eyes do wander to the section where comments pile up while we are waiting for the start of the press conference, as it is our duty to do to keep our readers and followers informed about the developments with regard to the number of Coronavirus cases.

That particular time of the day makes us understand even better – because, let’s face it, deep down we already know it – that social media exposes all the stupidity and ignorance that there is out there. In the past, this stupidity and ignorance existed too, but it was contained and limited to a chat between acquaintances within four walls. Now it is all over the world.

Of course, it is not only in that particular page that such comments come up. The social media is full of instances when the lowest depths of humankind surface for all to see. The real pity of the social media is that the intention to have a platform for sharing is good, but at the end of the day it also provides the stage for people with nothing better to do than to show their pathetic limits – be it linguistic or grammatical, but also of depth of thought, not to mention their hatred and racism.

And, frankly speaking, the bad side of humanity always manages to appear stronger than the good side. The social media is not an exception.

It is said that everyone has a right to an opinion, and there is no question about that. But it seems that few are the persons whose contributions in the social media add some kind of value to other people’s lives. The people with something to say keep back from saying it, but many with nothing to say want to share that nothing with the rest of the world.

Someone once said that the more a person knows, the more he or she realises how much he or she does not know. But then there are many who think they know everything. These people must have never understood the meaning behind the saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain: “Better to be thought a fool than speak up to prove it”.

Worse than this, it is evident that the social media has helped in no small way in the distribution of fake news and misinformation which, in a serious situation such as this Coronavirus pandemic that the world is facing, add to the confusion and panic.

Facebook has said that it will soon start informing people who shared or liked stories which contained misinformation on Coronavirus, redirecting users to a site where the World Health Organisation lists and debunks myths and rumours about the disease.

Well, this is rather late in the day given that COVID-19 has been affecting our lives since at least the start of the year – more so in the last two months, in Malta’s case. In the meantime, so much fake information has made it to Facebook pages, with so many gullible people believing everything that is thrown at them and, to make matters worse, distributing them to other groups.

There are many people who unfortunately think that “if it’s on Facebook, then it must be true”.

Which takes us back to where we started – stupidity.