Social Media Outrage is Killing People

Riots have become a nightly occurrence in America, driven by social justice-fueled outrage against police brutality. Every city is just one officer-involved shooting away from erupting into violence. Despite the evidence (including bodycam footage) that exonerated the police officer involved in the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Ricardo Munoz, who lunged at an officer in Lancaster with a knife, riots erupted in the Pennsylvanian city and elsewhere across the country. The protesters’ anger was primarily fueled by misinformation and agitation on social media. 

Not all of this protesting starts out ill-intentioned; all it really takes to get someone to march against injustice is to show them that this injustice is happening right outside their doorstep. Most people care about right and wrong, and when they perceive an injustice, they’ll do whatever’s possible to make sure they’re standing on the right side of history after the ashes settle. And most people who protest aren’t doing so just to score woke points or start trouble. They believe what they’re told—and what they’re being told, in this instance, was that a 14-year-old autistic boy was “executed” in cold blood by a psychopathic police officer in Lancaster, PA.