Dear Agony Aunt,
What should you do when looking at the news feels overbearing? Most times, the news stories are bad enough, but it’s the replies, and the rampant hypocrisy that makes it unbearable. Twitter is the worst, and humans can be really despicable creatures behind screens. You grow up learning the values of treating people right, that racism doesn’t exist in the UK, and that people shouldn’t be targeted for how they look. Yet, you scroll through and see every moral out the window and grown adults at their worst. Analysing government actions spews the same kind of hypocrisy, and you feel even more helpless. It really makes you lose hope in humanity, and when you feel like it targets personal parts of yourself, its really derailing.
Dear Disillusioned News reader,
Firstly, I think that you have to remember that social media is just an echo chamber and it isn’t the right place to look at the news. What I would do is to start looking for alternative news sites which are delivering viable content. Ask around, ask your tutors and get some advice about where you can go to for your daily news. There are many sites which have better representation than the mainstream sites. Secondly, If you are finding Twitter to be a negative space, try and get some space from it, have a digital detox and spend some time speaking about these issues to you friends or colleagues. Thirdly, you have to learn that while it is targeted at certain groups of people, it is not personal. Try and be critical of what you are reading, see the issues with it and in turn follow people who are thinking the same. Surround yourself with activists who are trying to change things and remember that there is positive news around, you just have to actively find it.
