Social media offers us all an intriguing window into other people's lives - we get to peek behind the curtain and see how other people live, and often this can be far more distressing than it is enlightening. Indeed, there are plenty of occasions where people share things on social media which shock and outrage them; when the original footage it stems from was intended as nothing more than a light-hearted joke.
Take the following Snapchat video for example, which shows a young mother feeding her little baby from what looks like a bottle of red wine. The baby is obviously too young to be drinking alcohol, but there doesn't appear to be any wine in the bottle when the child was miming sipping from it, and the child's parent seems to consider it all a big joke.
However, the video, which apparently hails from Lanarkshire in Scotland, has left many social media users disgusted and angered by what they view as an example of neglectful parenting. One person who viewed the footage commented: "I’m actually lost for words at that, it’s absolutely disgusting." Another commenter added: "Absolutely vile to do that to a child, poor little girl. Me heart breaks for her."
On the other hand, some viewers chose to defend the woman in the video, and have pointed out that there is no evidence in the 7-second clip to suggest that the child was actually imbibing alcohol. One commenter wrote: "This isn’t wine as the child would obviously have a reaction to the taste which she didn’t. This is water or juice in this bottle and the mother is just looking for attention."
However, it's not all bad when it comes to video of children on social media. Last week, a heartwarming picture went viral, showing a man at a doctor's office holding a woman's baby while she filled out some complicated paperwork. The adorable image was shared thousands of times by people who were touched by the good Samaritan's kindness and altruism.
Commenting on the incident, Natasha Wilson (who took the original picture) stated in a later interview with CBS: "He loved on the baby as it was his own. I knew that he never interacted with this child before...it was just really really heartwarming ... It was touching for me because my children are biracial. It was heartwarming, especially because he was an older white man, just completely not thinking anything of race."
She added: "Just loved on this baby as if it was his baby. He completely saw nothing of colour, and neither did that mom. I see both sides of everything. It's just not very often that you see compassion for a complete stranger, and especially across races ... It just takes each one of us to teach our children there is no colour, there is no hate."
We still don't know whether or not there was any wine in the bottle on that particular day. But parents: heed this warning. Don't let your kids near alcohol. Seriously.
