Social Media: From Connection to Deception

 I still remember the first time I logged into Orkut as a teenager. My heart raced a little when a new “friend request” popped up, or when someone wrote a sweet testimonial on my profile, P.S. I got first conversation with my first love over Orkut. Those were innocent days. We posted badly lit selfies, shared forwarded jokes that ended with “PJs,” tagged friends in silly quizzes, and flirted in the most awkward, harmless ways. Social media felt like an extension of the school corridor; loud, chaotic, and full of laughter.

Then the world rushed in.

Almost overnight, everyone got a smartphone. Grandparents joined Facebook, uncles discovered Twitter, and suddenly the timeline was no longer about weekend plans or crush confessions. It became a war zone. People who smiled at each other during family weddings were tearing one another apart over politics, religion, and caste. Perfectly normal human beings turned into keyboard warriors before breakfast. A joke could start a riot; a rumor could ruin a life.

And then came the money.

Authentic voices got drowned out by “content creators.” Product reviews stopped being honest, they became 60-second advertisements with discount codes. Memes, once the purest form of humor, started carrying brand logos in the corner. Even heartbreak posts felt scripted for engagement. Likes, shares, and followers became the new currency, and truth was the first casualty.

Today when I scroll, I don’t recognize the internet I once loved. It feels like a tired, angry machine that runs on outrage and sponsored posts. Worst of all, children are growing up inside this machine, absorbing half-truths, comparing their bodies to filtered faces, learning that self-worth is measured in views. With AI deepfakes and bot armies joining the chaos, we can no longer tell what’s real and what’s manufactured. The line between reality and illusion has vanished.

That’s why, when I heard Australia is banning social media for kids under 16, something inside me exhaled. Finally, someone is drawing a boundary. A childhood should be filled with scraped knees, secret forts, boring afternoons that force you to invent your own games, not endless scrolling through other people’s curated highlight reels. Let children discover the world with their own eyes before we hand them a screen that teaches them to hate, to pose, to perform.

So here’s my quiet plea to all of us who still remember the old internet:

• Pause before you share. Ask yourself: Am I adding light or just more noise?
• Never outsource your thinking to an influencer with a ring light. Most of them are selling something—sometimes a product, sometimes an ideology, always themselves.
• Protect the kids. Delay the phone, delay the apps, delay the poison for as long as you can.
• And please, step outside. Touch grass, talk to a real human without recording it, watch a sunset that no filter can improve.

Life beyond the screen is still there; messy, slow, unfiltered, and breathtakingly real.

In a world that screams for your attention, the quiet act of thinking for yourself remains the last true rebellion.

Take it back.