An image of a message (below) apparently posted by a girl called Keely is circulating Facebook. The controversial image, above, contains a message that is both offensive and vehemently anti-war.
It is inherently difficult (for us or anybody) to determine whether the person shown on the image actually authored the message, and this is one of the reasons why it is important to never circulate this type of nonsense across Facebook.
The fact is that whilst you are looking at an image that looks to be genuine, there are a number of different things that could have occurred here. For example the message could have been posted when the Facebook account was hijacked by an immoral cyber-prankster, or a clone account could have been created with the same name and profile picture, or, as some have suggested happened, an existing account could change its name and profile picture to match that of the target in another type of clone attack. (We did see an account apparently belonging to a male that had recently altered its profile picture and account name to match the account in question)
The point is, we do not know for sure, and neither do the people who have opted to circulate the image, or to send death threats and other vile insults and diatribes directed towards the account that appears to have made the post.
Ultimately this is another type of “trial by social media” where a subset of Facebook users act as judge, jury and executioner based on unsubstantiated posts, and it is this type of behaviour that causes some of the biggest problems we see on the social media today, including cyber-bullying and misplaced vigilante “justice”.
Whilst we can all agree that the sentiment expressed in the image above is wrong by any moral standard, users should not let their emotions get the better of them. No matter how compelled you feel to let your feelings be known to the author, you can seldom be sure on social media exactly who penned a message like this.
In the opinion of this author at least, such Facebook users who feel justified to send death threats or hurl disgusting insults at other users based purely on unsubstantiated images they stumble across on Facebook, should themselves take a long and hard look at the way they use social media. There is simply no place for that on Facebook, no matter how legitimate the image is or is not.
