In the wake of any widespread disaster or tragedy, social media can serve a vital role in helping people involved let their families know they're alright; to seek help; or to try get information on family members or friends who are still missing.
In the immediate aftermath of the utterly appalling shootings that occurred in Las Vegas today, where a lone gunman opened fire from a balcony on the 32nd floor of the Mandala Bay hotel onto a crowd of people gathered below for the Route 91 Country Music Festival, leaving some 50 people dead and approximately 400 injured, people were using Twitter and other social media platforms to help discern the whereabouts of missing persons.
However, as with all things in life, there are unfortunately a shower of sub-human bell-ends who are willing to capitalise on the misfortune of others for their own ends. There are some people who have put out fake missing person reports on Twitter, due to the attention that such posts get, to then try and direct some of that traffic into gaining Twitter or Instagram followers. One such absolutely paltry excuse for a human goes by the name of 'YK BruT3r' on Twitter. They sent out a Tweet pretending to be a concerned parent whose son was missing in the attacks. The tweet gained some 5,000 retweets as people sought to lend assistance to, what they believed was, a mother earnestly trying to search for her missing son. However the same Twitter account then posted a reply saying "While ya'll here follow me on Instagram" with a link to their Instagram.
MY SON IS MISSING IN Mandalay Bay PLEASE RT IM REALLY WORRIED, RECENT PHOTO BELOW. Brandon W. Kingsom 218-440-2391 AGE:15
PLEASE HELP pic.twitter.com/cj6FSiidnz
— YK BruT3r (@redevicer) October 2, 2017
While y’all here follow me on Instagram! https://t.co/O2Hb85pX1T ??
— YK BruT3r (@redevicer) October 2, 2017
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The Instagram, to save you the trouble of clicking through to it, merely contains two photographs. One of a man standing in a stairwell, the other of, presumably the same man, perched atop what appears to be some kind of sewage pipe. We can only hope that he's figuring out some way to gain access to the pipe and immersing himself in its grubby effluence, where he truly belongs.
This sort of self-centred opportunism, to get some vague online attention for several underwhelming photographs make you despair for humanity. Given that there are only two photographs on the account, it has either been set up to see how many followers it could get through this opportunism, as some sort of perverse social experiment, or is simply just a man who has nothing better to photograph in his life than a stairwell and a sewage pipe. It is moments like this that makes it feel like the development of what can loosely be called civilisation has been a massive waste of time and we should simply pack it all, return to living isolated in caves, occasionally painting buffalo on the walls, chewing on grass and wait until we die of sepsis from some complicated tooth infection at the age of about 35.
It is absolutely appalling seeing someone trying to exploit the goodwill of people on a day of such a horrific tragedy. The Twitter account has since been suspended.
