14/06/2025
Rage over Truth
There is a peculiar cruelty in the way social media disembowels truth. It is not merely that lies spread faster than facts—that has always been the case. No, the deeper sickness is how disagreement itself has mutated into something far more sinister: a ritualised performance of outrage where the goal is not to persuade, nor even to defeat, but to annihilate the opponent’s very right to speak.
To call someone a liar without evidence is not an argument—it is an incantation. A spell cast to dissolve the burden of proof. In traditional Yoruba discourse, the accusation of dishonesty was grave, requiring substantiation. But on social media, it is a reflex, a way to dismiss inconvenient truths without engaging them.
Why? Because engaging would require work—research, reasoning, and the humility to admit one might be wrong. It is far easier to scream "Liar!" and retreat into the safety of one’s own unchallenged beliefs. The word no longer carries the weight of condemnation; it is merely a noise, a verbal rock thrown to shatter the windows of dialogue. A reverse alibi to silence the truth
When the human mind encounters a fact that contradicts its worldview, it has two choices: adapt or attack. Social media accepts the latter. If you present evidence that unsettles someone’s ideology, they will not refute it—they will refute YoU. Your intelligence, your motives, and your very humanity will be called into question. This is the new dialogue, the social media way!
However, such style is not a debate; it is psychological warfare. The goal is no longer to disprove the argument but to exhaust the arguer. To make truth-telling so emotionally costly that fewer dare to attempt it. Subtle blackmail against the truth and fact. What philosophy called argumentum ad hominem is a fallacy, but in the digital age, it has become the dominant mode of discourse.
Truth is not always comforting. Fact is always sacred. Sometimes it is a knife, cutting through the comfortable illusions we wrap around ourselves. And like a wounded animal, the collective ego of social media often responds with fury.
This is why messengers of inconvenient truths are so viciously targeted. It is not merely disagreement—it is betrayal. By stating facts that disrupt the narrative, you become a traitor to the tribe. And tribes punish traitors not with rebuttals, but with exile, humiliation, or worse. The hatred directed at truth-tellers is not rational; it is primal. A defence mechanism against cognitive dissonance so violent it borders on hysteria.
Perhaps the most dangerous distortion occurs when legal proceedings are stripped of nuance and weaponised. Courts deliberate in detail, weigh evidence, and apply precedent—but social media reduces these complexities into slogans. A single out-of-context quote becomes "proof" of corruption. A verdict, stripped of its legal reasoning, is recast as a political conspiracy.
This is not ignorance; it is willful and self-imposed ignorance. The facts exist, and the court documents are public—but they are ignored in favour of a more satisfying narrative. The law is no longer a system of justice but a prop in a partisan theatre, where the audience cheers not for truth but for whichever side confirms their biases.
What we are witnessing is not merely the degradation of debate but the unravelling of a fundamental social contract: that disagreements should be settled with reason, not force. Social media has rewired our instincts, replacing the slow, difficult work of critical thinking with the instant gratification of moral condemnation.
The solution is neither silence nor surrender. It is to recognize these tactics for what they are—not arguments, but psychological operations designed to silence dissent. The next time someone( even if such a person is a lawyer) calls you a liar without evidence or attacks your character instead of your claims understand that they are not trying to win a debate. They are trying to end it.
Let me end this by saying that we can not abandon truth for cheap victory because we all lose in such social media reverse psychology and as for me and my tendency, we will always choose fact over noise and truth over rages.
©️ Waheed Saka
2, Obale's compound Oke aafo
Ikirun. Osun State
