I have come to learn that most Gambians are potentially narcissistic sociopaths. Many display a few sociopathic traits in politics when our society becomes highly politicized, but majority aren’t sociopath. They are excited by misfortune and are good at pretending to care. They gravitate towards the macabre, scandalous, and gruesome as flies gravitate to swine faeces. And that is why our social media influencers – whose perennial shield is ‘we give our audiences what they want’ – know well to feed us with scandals and family trifles.

One day you are ring-leading in cyber bullying – dropping epithets on people’s walls, calling them whores, ‘community borehole’, and worse, sharing, compromising and intimate pornography on marital sex, photos, video images raising eyebrows of individuals both adolescents and teens on daily basis. Married people are affected the hardest. From high-profile celebrities to politicians and from all-star sports, media personalities to ordinary parents are cyber bullied on social media.

And on another day, you are sanctimoniously preaching mental health on your Facebook statuses – inundating our inboxes with forwarded messages of religious verses, hymns and advocate causes on mental health and social justice pretending to commiserate that so many people are depressed.

Non-consensual distribution of intimate images online is cyber bullying like normal bullying, causing intentional harm or disturbances if you stole someone’s hurtful images or pictures and passed it off online expect friends and haters preconize you for to damaging someone’s dignity, ruin someone’s reputation with devastating consequences.

There is a mental health problem with people who create a false image of themselves out here just to please the crowd and fit into a celebrity culture that is clearly out of their realistic grasp.

It is cyber bullying with social communities, using smart phones to upload and instantly share nude and sexual pictures without someone’s consent on the internet has become a regular part of our lives. It’s illegal with a potential to have your photos stolen or misused without permission on Facebook, Twitter hashtag to ruin your reputation. It is dishonest if you stole someone’s intellectual property protected by trade secret laws, trademarks, patents, or copyrights and distribution of content in the public domain without, proper citations for reproduction on social media.

Our children need a new set of celebrities to look up to. We need a new set of public figures who will tell our girls that it is okay to ride in a gele gele on your way to a date because it is your money and you’re the one dictating terms. We need a new set of celebrities who will post pictures of themselves in drug rehab, to tell the world that life isn’t rosy as it seems on television and celebrities are also human after all. We need a new set of celebrities who shall post pictures of their children’s academic report with all those E scores, and still be proud of them for the world to see.

We need a new set of celebrities to reassure our children that you can still earn genuine money through the sweat of your brow and without breaking anyone’s neck. Our children need new role models to tell them the truth about the dangers of relying on short cuts. Our children need to be told that you can fake your way to the top all you want, but sooner or later you will get smoked out. And that’s the day shit will hit the fan bad.

 By Alagi Yorro Jallow