Commentary: Remember when social media used to be fun?

SINGAPORE: It’s 2012. You seat yourself upon your porcelain throne, and pull out your state-of-the-art mobile smartphone to tap on a blue app icon – either one with a little white bird on it, or one with a white “F” in lower case.

On your shiny touch screen, you type: “Taking a poop. LOL.” And you hit “post”, uploading it for the masses.

Several likes on Facebook, easily. A retweet or two from friends on Twitter. You glance at the last post you’d shared on social media – a picture of you and your family making funny faces over dinner, or an unfiltered thought that happened to cross your mind while waiting for the bus.

Now, instead of keeping you connected with friends and family, social media has become something of a cesspool for judgment and criticism.

Post something less than flattering? Several nasty comments about your weight, barely visible acne scars and slightly crooked teeth are sure to come your way from strangers you have never met who might not even live on the same continent.

Love to dance? RandomUser123 will comment on your TikTok video that you were a tad offbeat, your arm movement was not sharp enough – and you misspelt “choreography” in your caption. 

You wouldn’t even need to be posting anything anywhere online. You could just be minding your own business only to find a photo or video of yourself on a random social media post made by a stranger with the caption: “Why would you wear this out?” 

It’s become almost unbearable to use social media as everyone has to be perfect online now. 

Slight tweaks to your face on an editing application and a colour filter to make things more aesthetic are the norm. Photos are well planned with specific angles used, and long gone are candid pictures and “unglams”.

But recently, one trend has breathed fresh air into the social media game, encouraging people to be unapologetically themselves: “We listen and we don’t judge”.

The trend involves friends, family or couples reciting the eponymous phrase – “we listen and we don’t judge” – before taking turns to confess embarrassing but harmless secrets about themselves, like using each other’s expensive shampoo or a child stealing their sibling’s expensive glitter gel pen. 

BREATH OF FRESH AIR

This trend started gaining traction late last year, but unlike most contemporary social media trends, it doesn’t seem to be dying out just yet. To date, there are over 39,000 TikTok posts tagged with #welistenanddontjudge. 

One reason for this: Unlike most social media trends of recent years, which usually require users to simply repeat or mirror actions and behaviours performed by others, “we listen and we don’t judge” made it feel like most participants were truly revealing their authentic selves online. 

Some were sweet, like one half of a couple admitting to pretending to be full so their partner would have more to eat. Others erred on the side of embarrassing – like how some people dealt with running out of toilet paper in a public toilet.

Although some users did judge people’s confessions, “we listen and we don’t judge” has done less harm than many other viral trends in the past few years. 

Take for example diet trends, or the “paper trend” that sparked body-image issues by calling for people to show off their waists if they were smaller than an A4 piece of paper. There's also the “blackout challenge” where kids choke themselves till they lose consciousness – which experts have warned can lead to brain damage or even death.

Perhaps the most harm done by the “we listen and we don’t judge” trend are the relationships that end after people admit secrets in an overly casual way – like cheating or playing pranks that cross boundaries like reading someone else’s journal. 

However, fallout like this is personal, limited to participants of those trend entries only. Such damage rarely branches out to inspire or encourage harmful attitudes, behaviours or responses in viewers. (Also, fun internet trends are no excuse for you to be ignorant of what would constitute crossing a major boundary with your partner or friend.)

"HEALTHIER" SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS?

“We listen and we don’t judge” isn’t just about curbing prevalent attitudes of overcritical judgment in internet spaces. It’s an encouraging sign that we might have healthier viral trends that are still fun.

As someone who works in the public eye, I have received my fair share of nasty emails and comments. I was told I was too “fat and ugly” to be a journalist, and that I would be lucky to find someone willing to date “a whale”. 

I’ve long learnt to ignore these by now – but I did have several days ruined the first few times I received such comments.

These experiences did teach me to grow a thicker skin, which can be a good thing. But wouldn’t it be far better to address the root of mental trauma online for many more by taking steps to make internet spaces more judgment-free?

We can’t ignore what experts have said over and over again about the potential of social media to wreak havoc on our mental health, especially for impressionable youths.

But besides the relentless algorithms that feed us endless trains of content, how we engage and interact with each other on these platforms is also to blame. It is, after all, easy to forget people have feelings when you’re perceiving them largely as images and words on a screen.

Lately, there seems to be something of an uptick in judgment-free content going viral on social media – for instance, the dishevelled face of muppet Pepe the King Prawn has become the face of people sharing their life stories to the tune of a choir’s soulful rendition of Madonna’s hit “Like a Prayer”.

Hopefully, this is a sign that social media can indeed be just pure fun again.

Loraine Lee is a journalist at CNA TODAY.