“Avoid politics and the multitude of irrelevant struggles designed to channel your energies into someone else’s agenda.”
The key tension of social media is that there are a lot of bad ideas, but there are a few really good ones mixed in with them. The good ideas have the potential to give you insight, to change your worldview into something that views it more truly. But, on the other end, the vast majority of the ideas are bad, and there is a great deal of risk of incorporating bad ideas that make your worldview worse.
How do you avoid the bad ideas? How do you identify the good ideas?
Within that tension, we also see strategies emerge.
- Opt-out: You could opt out of social media entirely and focus on something like books or even the canon. This way you are exposed to literature, or ideas that have stood the test of time.
- Filter bubble: You could define as good anything the corresponds with your current belief system.
- Skeptical: Assume all ideas are bad, and then accept a very small few as a working set necessary to navigate the world, and to constantly be pruning that set, trying to make it smaller.
- Contrary Corner: The cynic who brings unwelcome ideas and norm busting behavior to every door, as a tool to break conformity of thought
:This is not an exhaustive list, but it does point to the fact that the best approach might be multi-modal, where each of these strategies can be employed with some profit. But, if you rely on only one of them, the trade-offs mute much of the benefit.
So, when to make the trade-off? When use one strategy versus another? Some of it is understanding the media and what it offers. Social media is a kind of OverSoul, or collective brain of humanity. So, it is a good way to get a sense of what it happening right now, and what people are thinking about. This is useful because we interact with one another in real time, and taking the temperature of the room or the world is an important skill.
But, it is also a different skill that knowing what has long-term value or seeing something problematic in your social milieu that you need to challenge. There’s also the question that there are communities of practice or ideology. Often, when we join a community, we do not have a good sense of its culture. Or, perhaps, the culture changes in a way that we find an improvement or a detriment. I’ll write more on this later.
For the problem at hand, I think the key thing is to keep open to ideas and influences, but develop a strong, skeptical filter than starts on the assumption that new ideas are all, at least partially, false. Getting into a back and forth, reply guy style is probably a waste of everyone’s time. So, perhaps the best approach there is to make a determination, and unless it is a person you know personally, let it go by without comment. You don’t need to clean up the information stream, you just have to collect something drinkable for yourself.
cafebedouin.org 
I would agree that a multi-modal approach is necessary.
While I am not responsible for cleaning up the entire information stream, I think it is worth striking targets of opportunity in order to help others cope.
The time travelers visit us more now, with less fanfare, because they know more about us than they did about Moses. If you don’t bare some soul to the fusion centers, nobody will come for you. It is better to be used than useless.
I think we have a fundamental different outlook in this respect: a corollary to the fundamental belief I have that “You cannot tell people anything,” is that “People don’t want to be saved.” The key terms in your comment are “help others,” and the reality is that helping others implies community, leveraging the collective to achieve some aim. The power of the individual, in almost all instances, doesn’t scale. Where it does scale is in leadership of a community, leveraging the power of many in the interest of accomplishing some aim.
We can choose to be part of these communities and be used. In order to be accepted, we must bear our soul, but we must also conform. There is a saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Is going alone useless? By the above, it would seem so. But, is it useless to the individual traveling? Do the nuchnibi have no value? Depends on who is doing the assessment and over what timeframe.
For me the goals exist far beyond my life and time, and far beyond the bounds of any community. I don’t want to save anyone, as that is impossible. But helping some people cope, or learn, or grow does make a difference well beyond the scope of any community. You never know the consequences of an act of kindness, and leaders obsess over knowing the consequences of their actions and orders.
Going alone is not useless, as long as you go somewhere that matters. Communities will all die, just as surely as you or I. But our consequences echo for eternity.
Not going to argue with a philosophy of doing good where you can. Of course, as with most things, the devil is in the details.