How to Make Your Social Media a Positive Place
If your social media is full of negativity, this is what to do
Social media can be a brilliant place, it can also be an unbelievably powerful source of negativity. The question is what to do if your social media is the latter?
The conventional answer people give is to delete it, but I think there is a better option, and that is learning how to make social media work for you.
The way to do this is by firstly identifying whether your social media accounts are sources of negative energy, and then secondly if they are changing how you use the platforms to transform them into places of positive energy.
I hear what you’re thinking, why do you need to check if it’s a negative place if you already know it is, the reason is frequently, and this is just in my experience, we don’t realize that our social media accounts have become places of negativity in the first place.
Literally, negativity in the world of social media can just sneak up on you, which means you have to be constantly vigilant, constantly checking how it is affecting you mentally.
With this in mind, what I’m going share in this post are questions which if you ask yourself, will help you to work out whether your social media accounts are affecting you negatively, and, if you identify that they are, actions you can take to transform your social media accounts into sources of positive energy.
Note: for the purposes of simplicity, I’m going to focus on Facebook and Twitter. However, the principles for how to identify any negativity on these platforms and replace it with positivity can be used on any content-based media platform, from Instagram to TikTok, to Google News to YouTube to even Medium itself.
How to identify whether your Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of negative energy
Is your Facebook and/or Twitter feed filled with news articles and opinion pieces, and are those news articles and opinion pieces frequently negative in sentiment, or even do you find yourself frequently feeling negative emotions like anger or frustration, or sadness after reading them?
And what about individual tweets and Facebook statuses, are the ones you are seeing frequently negative, or do they frequently draw a negative response from you? And what about the ones you write yourself? Do they bring about negative responses, do you find yourself getting into lots of arguments and debates over them which leave you feeling upset or angry?
If the answer to any or all of the above questions is yes, then your Facebook and Twitter accounts are places of negativity and you need to do something about it otherwise eventually, if they are not already, they will start detrimentally affecting your mental state.
And you have to be really honest with yourself here, think about how you are feeling while you are reading what you are reading, interacting with what you are interacting with. Really think about how it is affecting your mental state. And not just during, but after. Think about how interacting with social media is affecting you not just while you are using it, but afterward.
If you have read an article from your feed, how are you feeling in the period after having read it, is it lingering on your mind in a negative way? And how long for, hours, days, weeks, months? And what about if you’ve got into a debate with somebody in a comments feed, is it draining you of emotional energy and ruining the rest of your evening?
Be really honest with how your interactions with social media are affecting you. Are they bringing about positive feelings or negative ones?
What to do if they are bringing about negative feelings
Stop reading those articles and stop reacting to those tweets and Facebook statuses, and stop writing those tweets and Facebook statuses. And stop following those accounts which keep flooding your feeds with negative content.
Note that I did not say stop using Facebook and/or Twitter, I said stop reading those articles, and stop reacting to those tweets and Facebook statuses, and stop writing those tweets and Facebook statuses. And stop following those accounts.
The reason being, Facebook’s and Twitter’s algorithms, along with all content-based media platforms, work by giving you more of what you are interacting with. This means if you are constantly clicking on articles and opinion pieces that are negative in sentiment and which fill you with negative emotions, they will keep giving you more of those exact types of articles and opinion pieces.
If you keep interacting with the comments of these pieces which are affecting you negatively, they will keep showing you more of them so you can interact with more of them. And if you keep following and interacting with people who are constantly posting negative content, constantly responding to you negatively, your feed is going to be constantly filled with negativity.
That is how the algorithms work and is how the algorithms of all social media platforms work: whatever you interact with they give you more of. So if what you are interacting with is affecting you negatively, and you keep interacting with that negative content when it is shown to you, keep following it, then you will keep seeing more like it. Meaning your feed will become flooded with an endless stream of addictive negativity.
But on the flip side, if you start following and interacting with things that fill you with positivity, then guess what, your feed will be filled with positivity.
And this does legitimately work, I’ve tried it, for example, I used to follow loads of newsfeeds on my Facebook which meant my feed was flooded with opinion pieces that were mostly negative in sentiment, now I follow mostly self-improvement profiles, which means my newsfeed is now flooded with positive advice and ideas rather than negative news stories.
The tactic is not perfect, after all, social media giants know that the best way to capture and retain your attention is by giving you something that provokes you, and, as much as it grieves me, positivity is far less likely to get a reaction from us than negativity.
Anyhow, I’m digressing, despite this, you can transform your social media feeds into a much more positive place, and you can do this by consciously refusing to interact with negativity, and, more importantly constantly, refusing to be manipulated into reacting to anything that is clearly designed to provoke you into a reaction.
Social media commentators, news outlets, basically all content makers want your interactions, meaning if you keep interacting with negativity they will keep creating negativity because it is what you are buying. That means to stop all the negativity, you have to stop being so willing to buy it.
So if your feed is filled with negativity, then you don’t need to delete Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you can do that if you want, but you don’t need to, all you need to do is stop interacting with negative posts and start interacting with positive ones.
That means, and I’m reiterating this for emphasis, stop following profiles that constantly flood your feed with negative content, and start following ones that constantly fill it with positive content. Then start interacting with that positive content. That way social media will start working for you because it will become a positive influence in your life, rather than a negative one.
The added benefit is, the fewer people who interact with negative posts, the fewer incentives people will have to create negative posts in the first place. So you won’t just be improving your own life by ceasing to interact with negativity, you’ll be joining the fight to improve everyones.
Final words
Social media can be a great place, but only if we work towards making it a great place, that means making conscious decisions to identify places of negativity and replacing them with positivity.
The best thing about it, the moment you start making those conscious decisions, is the moment that your social media starts to work for you rather than against, because the moment you start making those decisions, is the moment your social media starts to flood you with positive energy.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading!
If you liked this post you may also like the following:
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