Liking This Post Will Ensure Your Spot In Heaven

I am subscribed to a number of dog pages and groups on Facebook and every now and then, I get to read about plights of pets who have been voilated and abused by indecent human beings. These stories come with photos or videos and some of it can be disturbing. You know what I'm talking about. You've probably come across many of these yourself.

To some extent, watching or looking at the photos/videos is torturous and so heart-breaking that my husband would often wonder why I like subjecting myself to these.  It isn't that I like this...emotional porn. Sometimes, I do wonder why I follow these groups only to breakdown and lose sleep over updates I've read. But I believe in their cause and I am behind what they do; maybe also slightly envious, but grateful, that there are people who can volunteer for it.

Charitable groups on Facebook aren't just limited to pets. There are countless of legitimate organizations that really do what they can to spread and seek support for whatever advocacy they represent. Like the dog pages/groups I follow, they provide facts and information about what happened to the victim --- man, woman, child or animal --- and *properly detail* what people can do to help. This last part is what's really the most important one, I think.

And then there are certain groups that post images like this below:

1 Like = 10 Pray :(
1 Share = 1$

To which Boromir says:

Here's another image I've seen being reposted for a couple of years now:

Note that there really isn't a lot of information about who this child is, what happened to her and where people can extend their help for her. It's most likely that this came from a page or group that is not a charitable organization at all, and probably just a random page that wants to increase its member-base.

Too cool, but selfish?  More like uninformed and uneducated.

I know it's tempting to put something like this on our wall, because I get that it makes one feel good about "doing something". But reposting the image delivers false advocacy, a misguided sense for doing good, and probably even a kind of exploitation. How can reposting or liking an image change what happens to the victim? How do we really help the cause when there's hardly any information and all we're doing is liking and reposting?

The problems are real outside of these social media sites, which means we can 1) either resist reposting (or liking) as a slacktivist, or 2) actually be proactive and do something for these causes.

Often, people who actually do something --- like donate, contribute, sign-up, reach-out, or volunteer --- need not put it on their walls for friends to like and repost.

Like this post if you agree. :P