How to reduce social media’s toxicity

You often decide to take a break from social media that is called “toxic” by a large number of people.

Toxic social media is disturbing the sanity of their minds because there are tons of disturbing news out there. Despite deactivating all social media profiles, you see them coming back again. Yes, it is addictive, but here is what you can do to reduce its toxicity.

1. UNFOLLOW ON FACEBOOK

Most of us have Facebook profiles along with other 1.5 billion people who use it every day. We all started with sharing pictures on our profiles, or with our friends, but now it has turned into a battlefield of narratives between people. The best thing you can do is to ‘unfollow‘ those people who you want to avoid.

Facebook is structured in a way that it will show you everything that you have searched in the past or what your friends are discussing, but when you unfollow someone, you’ll no longer see their activities or discussions.

In some circumstances, you cannot unfriend or block a person, because of the reaction that you will get would be proportional to a threat of breakup or a divorce. So unfollow that person to cut down negativity.

2. Stop tapping on everything on Instagram 

Although you might have control over what you follow on Instagram, you may turn off comments on your posts, or you do not follow hashtags that you do not like. But, what about the search tab that shows you the weirdest stuff you cannot even imagine in your nightmare. Here come the algorithms of Instagram.

If you are tapping on the pictures of dogs, 50-60% of the picture you might see would be of dogs – the rest of the pictures will depend on the previous searches done from your account. So, if you want to cut down what you see in the search tab, skip it for a few days and tap on only those items that you want to follow.

3. Twitter is not easy

Cutting toxicity on Facebook or Instagram might be little convenient, but handling Twitter in this regard is tricky. You might follow a writer that posted something you like, but their next tweet ruins your entire day, what you can do about it? Here is what you can do.

To block or unfollow that most toxic account would be just right. But if you like the real tweets of someone’s account and do not like their retweets, you can simply turn off retweet on a per-account basis. Moreover, you can use quality and advance filters to censor the words you do not like.

These are few tools you can tweak to filter toxicity, but if you really want to cut down of social media poison; discipline yourself. The biggest filter one can use is to have positive thinking, but that is another topic for some other day.