Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan once stated that, “We shape our tools; and afterwards our tools shape us.”

Prior to using social media as a tool for obtaining information, journalistic integrity demanded that professionals be patient and detailed. Fact checking was a fact of life.

Nowadays, in the rush to break new information, news and social media websites rapidly share information from unverified sources. Social media has eroded the relevance of a trusted source.

Websites such as Google News and Yahoo News pull from thousands of sources to display the most clicked on stories of the news day. The result is that oftentimes, the most sensationalized version of a headline is displayed to millions of visitors.

The most serious affect of social media appears to be the damage it does to innocent human beings.

We as individuals have an inert desire to cope with the guilt we feel after being presented with an act of injustice. When we believe in wrongdoing, as is the case of the Trayvon Martin incident, we as a culture fixate on an event in order to address particular values that we are supposed to carry as a people.

The viral spreading of information on social websites such as Facebook and Twitter, combined with our desire to do moral justice towards the situations that we’re informed of, occasionally causes us to inadvertently harass the innocent.

Late last month, Spike Lee posted what he believed to be accused shooter, George Zimmermann’s address to 250,000 of his Twitter followers. The address led to a completely unrelated house.

The older couple and their son faced a surge of news reporters at their front door as well as a series of death threats against their son, whose middle name was George and whose last name was Zimmermann.

In this day in age, social media is giving a voice to most anyone. The quality of a source and the integrity of journalism are fading. Ten years ago, the unchecked spreading of false information would have likely been stopped in its tracks by a closer look.

Unless media outlets spend as much time retracting misinformation as they do in presenting misinformation, falsely accused individuals are likely to suffer resentments for years to come.

Students and faculty may recall the Duke Lacrosse team facing the scorn of a nation following accusations that members of the team committed rape. These accusations were later retracted and the district attorney was removed from his position. Still, the scars of the social media blitz remain as misinformed citizens continue to judge.

Another such instance of drummed up misinformation was that of Dharun Ravi. Ravi was presented in the media as an individual who outed Tyler, his gay roommate, on YouTube by releasing a secret recording of his roommate’s homosexual activity.

After Tyler eventually moved out of the dorm, he jumped from a bridge to his death.

Ravi was charged with invasion of privacy for setting up a camera in a dorm room and for using it to view and transmit a live sex scene.

Even though this is the social consensus, Ravi never saw Tyler, who was openly gay, having sexual intercourse through his webcam.

The media purposefully trumpeted a false narrative that implied that Ravi drove Tyler to commit suicide.

Rather than address a mental health issue, this was presented as a hate crime. In the rush to do moral justice, none of the news sources reporting the incident did any real investigating or fact checking.

With one hand, our from-a-chair activism quickly spreads important issues, thus bringing relevant issues to light. With the other hand, we falsely accuse the innocent and endanger lives.

Things appear to be getting worse. Institutional integrity and loyalty continue to erode as socialized media, unreliable tabloids and sensationalist news outlets all gather steam.

Distinguished institutions were formed over time to solve these problems. Yet the gatekeepers of emerging facts are less relevant than ever; and the safeguards they provide are quickly eroding.

The revolution of social media has led to a rush to publish; which leads to a rush judgment; which leads to a rush to persecution.