If you have ever been reading your Facebook feed and you come across a story about your ancestral homeland, chances are, you might walk away with a negative impression. Chances are, you might even develop the view that there are all sorts of bad things happening in Serbia. You might want to think twice because a lot of the times, the information being spread about our country, and other countries for that matter, may not be all that accurate.

You have to understand that social media has really exploded and taken the commercial and sensational elements of traditional media to a whole other level. If you thought traditional media was prone to sensationalism and misleading headlines so they can sell a few more papers, well, you haven’t seen anything because social media has taken that and truly exaggarated it.

The whole point of social media, of course, is to get a lot of clicks. And if you were to use highly objective and circumspect headlines, people are not going to bother. People are just going to see the text, try to glean as much information as possible, and they scroll down.

When people process information using Facebook’s timeline, they seem like they’re in a hurry. They keep scrolling down. They keep going lower and lower and lower because they only have so much time to read news. Now, this may work for them, but it can do a big disservice to the people and organizations, as well as countries, depicted in the news. If you’re in a hurry and you misread a headline, you may have jumped to all sorts of bad conclusions as to the subject of the news story.

Unfortunately, Serbia has had more than its fair share of media distortions, thanks to social media. It may well turn out that the original news story is not all that biased. However, the way it is packaged on social media highlights and amplifies the weak spots of the original story.

This is the main problem with Serbian news that is not originally written by Serbian journalists. They are prone to sloppy mistakes, especially when it comes to touchy issues. They are also prone to writing in such a way that it can easily be manipulated, misunderstood or otherwise mishandled on social media. This is the key problem with news that are not written by our countrymen.

So if you are looking to stand up to such distortions and if you are looking to protect the pride and worth and value of our cultural tradition, you need to be more active on social media. If you see a piece of news regarding our country featuring a misleading headline, you can’t just silently scroll through.

You have to speak up. You have to hit the “comment” button and speak your mind. Let them know what’s wrong with the headline. Let them know what’s wrong with the article description and, most importantly, you have to supply an alternative.

Complaining is one thing, being part of the solution is another. If you really want to solve a problem, you can’t just speak up and complain. Now, that’s a very important first step. It is absolutely necessary, but it’s not enough. You have to also direct people’s attention to the solution to the problem that you just spotted.

Simply speaking up about the problem is just part of the solution. You have to go all the way and direct their attention to how they should address the problem. If enough Serbians are able to do this, then we would probably have less problems with fake news or exaggerated news involving our beloved mother country.