I’ve struggled to write this post– so much so that I have gone ‘post-less’ since last year. To be honest, having my miracle baby cracked my life right open in the best and scariest ways. Having a baby turned everything I thought to be true on its head, and I found myself in an endless void of contradictions, hypocrisy, and completely seeing the world through a different lens. My once edgy writing seemed too risky, and trying to write conservatively felt too basic. Social media seemed pointless, an endless barrage of people stepping on other people to make themselves look better. My life dedicated to empowering those without a voice to use social media to speak up seemed all in vain. Social shifted from a place of empowerment to a place for cheap tricks. I immediately closed the borders, creating my first-ever private Instagram account, refusing to share pictures of my baby on my growing public one.
Facebook public posts ceased, and a heart suddenly appeared on top of my baby’s face for any LinkedIn posts relating to his birth.
An environment that once felt more at home to me than this earth, because it was an enemy’s wasteland where I tread with exceeding caution and care.
Many are surprised to find out that I was raised anti-social media, coming into Facebook when only college students could join. Even as my freshman friends scurried to the site, I stayed off, much to their chagrin. My dorm suitemate had to share a Facebook post with me from a struggling freshman roommate who was eventually kicked out of school for threatening to kill me (worth a blog post of its own)– “The devil is blonde and wears Guess and eyeliner.” At the time, I wore my trademark heavy black eyeliner and was modeling for Guess. The threats only grew from there, and I found it a blessing not to have a Facebook to refresh to read the next hideous post about me constantly. Long story short, she was doing all of this to intentionally get kicked out of school because she hated college and wanted to go back home. I was her Plan B after trying to sell a fake pregnancy to her boyfriend and parents. She was hurting, and reading the wicked writings about me on Facebook would have only made me fume and add to her hurt.
But soon, my first college boyfriend wanted us to be ‘official’ on Facebook. He pulled on my leading heart chakra, and I reluctantly joined the herd of social media-obsessed classmates. Two weeks later, at his birthday party in his hometown, while staying with his family hours away from our college, his friends asked if I was ‘Mary’. Easy mistake; Marji vs. Mary. Their insistence that my boyfriend was dating ‘Mary’ from school and that I was supposed to have ‘red hair’ soon revealed that my boyfriend, who was supposedly Facebook-official, was two-timing me. Talk about an awkward rest of the weekend spent with his family. Within weeks of getting a Facebook account for the boy, I was going through my first Facebook breakup, and boy, did our friends choose sides. Social media sucked.
But I was good at it. As a writer and a model, the world of picture and caption worked quite well for me. With brands being introduced to Facebook a year after my college graduation, I found that my Public Relations degree and communications research experience allowed me to enter a world effortlessly, one that most brands were still trying to figure out. Now I was the one convincing brands that we needed to make it Facebook official, which even spurred a type of forgiveness reunion for that OG Facebook boyfriend and me.
Five years later, my personal social media world completely exploded as I went from an abusive marriage to being single overnight. A world that knew my now ex-husband as quirky and quick to respond in the most humorous ways to my tweets was suddenly out of my world. I was known for my severe authenticity on social, yet to be authentic in a moment where I had a splint on my right arm, he tore, and to admit I had been covering up months of locking myself in my closet while he threatened to tear the door down, was painful. But on April Fool’s Day, the ironic day that our divorce was finalized, I finally shared with the world what had actually been going on and why he was no longer on my channels. I braced myself for the gigantic backlash of fans calling me out as a liar, hating me for being so ‘fake’ after all, and accusing me of lying about someone they grew to love through my own original positive portrayal of him.
But instead, something beautiful happened. I woke up the next morning to an outpour of supportive messages, hundreds of people commending my strength. Beyond those, there were gems that I encouraged them to walk out on their abusive partners after they read my post. I was the last push they needed to leave. To this day, I’ve received only two negative social channel comments (both from my ex-husband’s spam accounts) and two negative blog post comments (both ‘anonymously’ from my ex-husband) related to my ‘coming out’ post.
Social media became my refuge, and the more honest I was about my life, the more people I was able to help, and more people were able to help me.
But now, after building a community that I know inside out, that knows me inside out, all I want to do is protect my son. While I’ve poured my energy into him, I’ve had an opportunity to sit back and listen more than ever. Between algorithm changes and the surge of AI, I see less of a community supporting each other and more of a community tearing each other down. I see professional people on LinkedIn ripping others to shreds for their mistakes or different ways of thinking, all to prop themselves up.
“If one more person sends me an XYZ message on LinkedIn, I’m done.”…while posting a screenshot of the private 1:1 messaging.
What’s wrong with you? Is there not a way to share best practices and show your intelligence without dragging someone else through the mud? What gives you the right to call someone out for having different politics than you when it has NOTHING to do with your profession and does not affect your work at all?
Where is the authenticity in an incredibly strained job market? Bless one of my connections who used to be the Head of Communication for large companies and now took a job at Penzy’s Spices to pay the bills while he continues a long job search. Bless him even more for sharing openly his struggles and honesty about what sometimes needs to be done in a job market like the one we find ourselves in now.
But there is a line, isn’t there? I kid you not, a woman called out the company she currently works for this morning for not being ‘challenging’ enough, going as far as asking her connections if she should quit her job. WTF are you thinking?? I want to send my Penzey Spice connection to her employer. He’d kill for her career.
Friends on Facebook are screenshotting other friends’ posts, calling them out for being terrible parents, and then propping up their own superhero mom skills. Don’t even get me started on the hate spreading across X. I was the head of social at ADL while we put all of the hate speech, antisemitism-fighting rules in place at Twitter that are suddenly torn down. Talk about watching your life’s work go right out the window.
Can’t we do better than this? Aren’t we better human beings than this?
Why use social media as a weapon when it has the power to make a positive change across the world? Social media isn’t the problem; the people using it are. We can enact laws to protect our children from social media, but as they grow into adults, they’ll face the sticky, negative web we’ve left them. Look at the examples we are setting for the next generation.
I grew up in the first social media generation and encourage those who also grew up working in or using the first social media networks to do better– BE better. Just like we are leaving the earth to the next generation, we are also leaving our digital footprints. Do yours pave the path for building community or pure destruction?
Words have the power to destroy human beings. Pictures, especially AI-manipulated pictures, have the power to destroy human beings. We are not a fully AI-bot universe yet. Human beings are on the other side of the content you are creating. Real-life souls that want to engage with you to learn, grow, and build relationships. Real-life souls that smile, cry, laugh, yell, FEEL. How are you using your power? How are you treating these individuals through your content?
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts from the past two years of being a heavy social media ‘observer’ rather than player. I am back in the game, and let me tell you, I will never betray my original mission of using social media to empower those who have faced injustice, grief, and pain.
I don’t want my son to read my hateful words against another person, just trying to make it out there on social media. I want him to be able to follow my footprints to a strong support system and empowering tool that can literally save lives.
I’ll ask you again: Do your digital footprints build a positive, supportive community, or do they tear it down?
– Marji J. Sherman
