Proxy humans - The worst kind of social media users!

A useless image disguised as a "helpful resource"

Something I dislike about many social media users - specifically when they do that on LinkedIn - sharing content with no way to trace back to the origin. Some users are just plain novice and they do so without knowing the ways to propagate the information in the right way. For example, see the viral image on the left hand side. It was shared by millions of such novice users. But who creates these images? Are they social media novices too? No, they surely are not. These are social media crocodiles who create these "information" just for the sake of getting more visibility. If you were fortunate/unfortunate to witness this image, you would have noticed that there was no caption or pointers to where to find the MIT's online course material. Of course, a quick Google search would reveal that. But the intention here is not to help (as it seems); rather to make this particular image itself popular/viral.

The worse offenders are those who copy-paste others' content without giving the credit or link to the original post. Some would argue that they are sharing knowledge here. Some might really be unaware of the "Share" mechanisms present in all the social media. However, most are deliberately plagiarizing. They function as a proxy human between the knowledge source and the public, preventing access to the source of information, by functioning as a proxy in the middle. 

Next time, when you spot a proxy human in social media, please do not engage with them much under their post. The more their post get engaged, higher the possibilities that it will eclipse the origin.