kids these days

Picture above via Urban Dictionary.

This weekend saw a disturbing hashtag trend made in promotion of the newest movie in "The Purge" franchise (you know, the movie that sets its premise on the idea that people would turn into violent Freudian monsters if crime was legal for a day rather than just like... deal with their problems like adults). The idea was to promote users to go wild and free on the social media network for a day, which inevitably led to jerks exposing graphically violent content - or even worse, nude photos of (often underage) ex-girlfriends.

This led some to parody the whole event outright:





Meanwhile, others got right to the heart of the matter:



Maybe instead we should have just purged social media from our system entirely?

From the Washington Post:

Now, a pretty dramatic new report out from Piper Jaffray — an investment bank with a sizable research arm — rules that the kids are over Facebook once and for all, having fled Mark Zuckerberg's parent-flooded shores for the more forgiving embraces of Twitter and Instagram. Between fall 2014 and spring 2014, when Piper Jaffray last conducted this survey, Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 percent to 45 percent. In other words, less than half of the teenagers surveyed said "yes" when asked if they use Facebook. (A note: There's no spring data available for the "no networks" option, which is why that spot is blank.)