While the rest of the world was worried about an asteroid that had no chance of colliding with the Earth, a meteor actually entered the atmosphere above Russia. Thank god it did not impact the ground, but the sonic boom still did plenty of damage. Most of the damage was due to shattered glass that injured over a thousand people. Since light travels much faster than sound (think about thunder and lightning), people saw the meteor streaking through the air and were shocked when the massive sonic boom came later, shattering windows and causing alarms to trip. That's what we know.

But before we knew this, we had no idea if there would be more injuries, or even fatalities. Yet people still flooded social networks with their "cool" and "amazing" photos and memes. I won't link to any here.

I am strongly against posting images of something that we don't yet know the outcome of. I noticed the same thing - people posting images of things with offensive captions and memes - even dwhen we knew of massive fatalities. This occurred during other natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake, the Indian Ocean tusnami, Hurricane Katrina.

I realize that we are living in a real time news world, but I think we should at least give some time when the damage assessments are out before pictures are shared.

For further reading, New Scientist has a great post on the basics of asteroids, meteroids, meteors, and meteorites.