Taking offence is the new clickbait

Think about the last time to you logged into Facebook or Twitter, what did you see? What did you share? In your feed, was there by any chance at least one article ‘calling out’ a piece of advertising, a celebrity quote or perhaps a new film for causing some kind of offence to a group of people, or perhaps all of us?

Are we offended?

Lately, it seems that we are all terribly offended by everything – but, in fact, are we? I think not. Many articles that you’ll see are simply using this ‘social media outcry’ label as a means of getting you to click and engage, and I’m not falling it for it anymore. In my mind, taking offence is the new call to action for clickbait and I’m worn down frankly. I’m sick of everyone being offended by everything. Sure, lively fun debate on trending topics is fine but do many recent examples really deserve the ‘feedtime’ that they get?

We all know that BBC Top Gear re-launched recently and has been all over social media, attacked for its sometimes slightly tasteless stunts (they always had them), questionable jokes (no change there) and for taking the mickey out of it’s old host Clarkson (a welcome change surely?). X-Men Apocalypse has been attacked and Fox Pictures has had to issue an apology for having a poster where the bad guy is attacking Jennifer Lawrence, it happens? She’s the heroine, what’s the issue? Kanye, well, Kanye is just Kanye and whatever he says upsets someone and fills up my feed.

Difficult questions

Essentially, what we need to start asking ourselves is how offended are we? And whilst we should always seek to protect minorities, different sexualities, and cultures in the social space, shouldn’t we be getting more upset about far bigger issues such as the EU Referendum, Global Warming, or the migrant crisis, and far less by derivative issues?