Lazy bunch: We miss on crucial information because we don't read

All kinds of scandalous allegations were quickly levelled against a man who Trump's supporters love to have a swing at.

In Kenya, deaths of prominent people seem to excite many on social media. Gossip is loved and when negative, even more. As such, speculation of death often takes social media by storm and a few times, it is proven the said departed people are actually still around, only killed by keyboards of rather enthusiastic human grim reapers.

Not once have we had senior politicians apologising for sending condolences to colleagues' families a little too soon. When it happens that a politician sent a peer "deepest sympathies" after the loss of a loved one, questions abound: why did you not call them directly to pass that message? Did it have to first pass through public eyes for approval? Was it not wise to first confirm the news? Are you clout-chasing?

Although it brings with it endless opportunities and possibilities, social media has been used to speed up propagation of misinformation. This has given rise to fact-checkers who, every day, are in a race to debunk lies, including nicely photoshopped images and fake websites that come up by the day deliberately to spew hate and spread propaganda.

It is well unlike in the olden days where there was no social media thus no overload of information. Every piece of news was interrogated carefully, and only travelled after all boxes were ticked by professional news tellers.

The Fool's Day prank, apart from showing gullibility, prominently revealed that we are a lazy lot who, unconvinced with taking in a whole article, masticating slowly and then digesting it, choose to either skim over, or are content assuming that the headline, or the first paragraph, is indeed equivalent to the whole story.

For there, at the bottom of the page, we indicated that we were fooling around but a fortnight later, some readers have never scrolled all the way down, which must be really slow reading.