Volume 8, Issue 1, Spring 2022
Paridhi Chaudhary
Pages 155-161
Fallacies in the Age of Social Media
Social media is known to be one of the finest achievements of the 21st century. However, it is no surprise that there are two sides to every coin. While there are a lot of advantages of social media in our day-to-day life it is difficult to ignore its negative consequences. As the interactions between people have increased so have the standards and expectations of people and undoubtedly, so has the mental distress that people constantly face. Multiple researches conducted on the negative impacts of social media indicate towards the downside of social media, especially it's negative footprint on people's identities, social life, mental health and emotional well-being. Although there are various modalities that have been used to identify and solve the problems that people experience with social media, there are other modalities of counseling that have the potential to be effective and helpful but have not been explored in this regard. One such modality is Logic-Based Therapy. Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation is a philosophy-based practice that aims to help identify the different emotional and behavioral ways in which people upset themselves by their own faulty thinking. LBT identifies a number of fallacies or incorrect reasonings that people use very frequently in their lives and also suggests ways in which individuals can learn to cope with these fallacies. A lot of the fallacies identified by LBT can be seen in practice through social media. This paper aims at providing an insight into the reality of social media and online presence while highlighting the most common fallacies that people commit in emotional and behavioral reasoning as identified by LBT. The paper will also explore how and why people often commit these fallacies and suggest some antidotes to combat these fallacies.