IT’S a steamy early Autumn day and a mum of three pulls up to Maccas in Glenfield to buy frozen Cokes for her kids.
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The children, aged between six and 12, stay in the car while their mum runs in to the store.
Within the space of minutes, a passer-by has snapped the car - emblazoned with the mum’s business name - and posted it to Facebook under the caption “poor parenting”.
Despite only a crumb of information, what follows is a classic Facebook pile-on, with dozens of users hyperventilating on outrage over the mum’s egregious abuse of parenting.
Forget the shades of grey - the fact the air-conditioning was still running in the car, the fact the children were old enough to grasp the concept of exiting the car if that air-conditioning suddenly malfunctioned.
Weaned on explicit warnings about hot cars and kids, and fuelled by self-righteous indignation, the keyboard commentators excoriated the mum, defaming her character along the way.
The story should act as a modern-day parable about the pervasive power of social media, where outrage is currency and following the leader the norm.
It comes as the federal government courts new laws aimed at compelling social media companies to take offensive content down. And they couldn’t come a moment too soon.
As for this poor mum, she’s certainly learned a valuable lesson – to use the drive-thru next time.
