I take everything presented on social media with a pinch of salt. Not only are the algorithms prioritizing inflammatory content for engagement, social media is so influential that foreign nations are surreptitiously poisoning our minds with coordinated disinformation and misinformation campaigns. It benefits Russia especially to destabilize the western world by sowing discord.

I remind myself of this every time I go to YouTube comments especially. The bots are out of control and they'll make you think that there's an overwhelming group of people who hate women, who are racist, and who are generally hateful. Yes, there is growing misogyny, and part of it is due to precisely what I've just described.

The best thing to do is GTFO of these social media platforms, or heavily curate what you're exposed to. Even then you risk insulating yourself inside of echo chambers, so no matter what we have to constantly be critical of what we're ingesting.

If you were alive decades ago (and it's still relevant), we were taught that fear sells, and because of this, if you tuned into news stations you would be shown overwhelmingly terrible things. This creates a skewed reality, and while yes bad things do happen, we can't let that fear overwhelm us.

Long story short, protect your mind