Fake news is so 2016

Social media is now in its adolescent stage. Gone are those carefree days of youth, when Twitter and Facebook felt like newly discovered beaches where we roamed free and played unconsciously as our skin burned. Now it’s gentrified and the beachfront is littered with corporate sponsors. We’ve also created a scene and began shouting at each other.

We are all disillusioned and scarred and we know better. And one of the things we have learned is that the only constant in the chaos of social media is backlash. No one is immune from it: not Taylor Swift, not Kanye West, not Jennifer Lawrence, and sorry Stranger Things fans, but not even Millie Bobby Brown will be spared. It’s the law of social media. It’s a law that we may have to cling to as a source of optimism this year because it also governs the world of paid trolls. Yes, their days may be numbered.

Sure, they may continue to get paid and continue to troll. But the number of real, unpaid, and non-troll people who buy their BS is dwindling. Back in the feverish campaign season of 2016, it was easy to confuse this manufactured phenomenon with the organic desire for change that brought the likes of Trump to power. But now that the shit has finally hit the fan, the lines are clearly drawn. It’s easier to distinguish the real patriots when Russian spy conspiracies and extra-judicial killings start getting exposed and the same old defensive rhetoric starts to get really old and sound very rehearsed and well-funded.

Fake news may finally meet its match, not in grizzled journalists or members of the intelligentsia, but in social media’s good old distaste for repetition. These trolls will eventually go the way of Kanye and Tay Tay: erstwhile charismatic underdogs who become insufferable and lame the minute they become the paradigm.