Something has gone wrong with us Singaporeans.
The year is barely a month old, and look at what's happened.
In three short weeks, we have made famous Anton Casey and "Heather Chua". The latter, we now know, is a man pretending to be a woman online and trolled his way into the police investigation room.
Meanwhile, Anton Casey, a British wealth manager, is deeply embroiled on several fronts because of his unacceptable social media posts. In one, he had expressed relief that his Porsche was out of the workshop and he could wash off the "stench of public transport". The post went viral, sparking anger online from Singaporeans.
They join an infamous list of social media users whose unfortunate choice of words resulted in rather serious consequences - Amy Cheong, Eve Tan, Andy Chan and a host of others who, at one point or another, said things on their social media pages which outraged a nation.
The incidents reiterate the need for us to reassess our social media habits. The common misconception is that our own Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Google+ is our own space.
That we keep behaving as though comments and posts to such media are private comments, says something about how habits are hard to break, demonstrated in our resistance to adapt to social media norms.
But that, however, isn't what is terribly wrong with us today.
A more disturbing phenomenon is the concept of social media justice.
Let's not mince words, the offenders' words deserved some kind of punishment, not just for the actual offence they caused, but perhaps for the sheer stupidity of what, how and why they said what they posted.
Whether the punishment was disproportionate to the crime is a matter of opinion.
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