Swiss rolls have becoming the latest sensation.
Yes, the sponge cake filled with whipped cream and chocolate ganache.
It started with a poignant drama: A mother bought eight pieces of Swiss roll. After six were equally shared between the son, daughter and father, and after finishing her chores, the mother took the remaining two.
This incurred the displeasure of the husband. After asserting her entitlement to the two pieces, the husband gave her a dressing down: "I am not saying you cannot have it. But as parents, you ought to lead a good example for the kids by having more of the proper meal. This is just snack, I guess you know well?"
The wife could only suffer in private, but apparently this did not prevent her from sharing the surveillance footage online, sparking an outpouring of pathos - and reality check.
A huge number of husbands have been reported subject to the Swiss rolls test, and Swiss rolls at Sam's have been sold out of stock.
The discussions have already turned to the necessity of marriage as an institution, and gender parity.
However, careful viewers suspect that the wife, notwithstanding her bumpy domestic ride, was plying a thriving e-commerce business.
Platforms are the ultimate drivers and accomplices for hosting such hot content.
There is a strong hint of foul play, though this would be hard to prove since it was supposed to be a domestic scene.
But another recent incident has been confirmed to be a scripted job.
A distraught wife, accusing a KTV woman of having a liaison with her husband, articulatedd the husband's exchanges with the woman on WeChat.
The revelations were sensational, until subsequent investigation suggested it was all a farce.
The wife, the supposed victim, had garnered a huge number of followers to her e-commerce business following the show - this is poisonous to a degree.
These constant creation and feeding of such social media memes tend to monopolize the public discourse, trivializing the national debate, and distracting people from news or issues that really matter.
When reduced to its bare essentials, these dramas usually revolve around an incident that could be easily sentimentalized, acted out by emotionally charged antagonists, in dramatic confrontations aimed to evoke mass commiseration, reflection, or outrage.
It is easy for the players to monetize the social media craze, in the form of advertisement inserts, with an explosive number of self-dealing self-media operators all eager to share in the buzz.
Platforms are the ultimate drivers and accomplices for hosting such hot content.
Even traditional media, increasingly responsive to the magic of social media buzz, might participate, playing up the drama, effectively handing over their agenda-setting mission to the unscrupulous money-making platforms.
Given the influence of these social media platforms, it is deeply disturbing why they are not subject to punishment commensurate with the damage they have inflicted, in cases where the platforms have, often knowingly, hosted scripted dramas as real stuff.
