Social media is a strange beast. It elevates you to the stature of a God and gives you unreal powers that can make or break careers. A tweet or an Instagram post from celebrities with huge fan followings like Virat Kohli can indeed have a massive impact on someone’s life. And, in turn, he is almost a hostage to it, exposing the problems that people of eminence face in a social media age.
In a bizarre turn of events, Kohli’s Instagram handle, through some algorithm malfunction as mentioned by him, posted a like on creator Avneet Kaur’s photo. It is a complete non-issue, to be honest. The first and only reaction should be: so what? And yet many eagle-eyed Instagram creators pointed it out and created a stir, prompting Kohli to issue a clarification. The matter did not end there and memes, by the dime and the dozen, flooded social media. Some of these were sarcastic, while others were plain disgusting.
Kohli supporters, in turn, decided to take up the issue and started posting random comments on Avneet’s page. They also demanded an apology from Instagram owner Mark Zuckerberg. It just went from bizarre to baffling. From incomprehensible to the banal.
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That’s what prompts us to take a pause and think what it is like to be Virat Kohli. Yes, he wields enormous power, but he is also hostage to this social media life which has elevated him to alpha-male status. Does anyone really need it, or is it all very superficial and flippant? While we will never know how Kohli deals with it or how he views it, suffice to say this social media menace is here to stay. Trolls, faceless bots with little to do, imagine themselves as active consumers of this spectacle and think of social media as a way to actively engage with the star.
This collapsing of boundaries, which is not the case in real life, passes on a sense of power to these millions of people, and transforms social media into a cesspit. For the moment, Kohli, Avneet and Zuckerberg all have to deal with this madness, whether they like it or not.
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— RevSportz Global (@RevSportzGlobal) May 3, 2025