THERE was a time, not all that long ago, when a person could go onto Facebook and write a status for the pure divilment of it – no filter, no ring light, and nobody pretending they were “just out of bed” with a curly blow-dry and a full face of make-up.

Just a wee sentence flung into the void: “At the pub. Queue for the toilets is a human rights issue.”

And wasn’t that enough for us? Were we not happy?

Somewhere along the way, the “pics or it didn’t happen” brigade staged a quiet coup, and now every night out must be submitted like a planning application with six photographs, three angles, and a caption that took longer to compose than the evening itself.

David Adams: Drumcree shows we’ve been kidding ourselves that we really had a ‘peace process’

Newton Emerson: Are Sinn Féin politicians opposing a parade ruling or opposing the law?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against a good photo – a picture can paint a thousand words, as they say – though the trouble nowadays, with the easy application of filters, is that those thousand words often consist entirely of lies.

Of course, the great cruelty of social media is that it never shows........

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