⛥𝕬𝖒𝖕𝖍𝖔𝖇𝖊𝖙⛦

• by the nature of language, words mean different things to different people. human society is an 8 billion person, multi-lingual game of Telephone: the message you receive isn't always the message that was trying to be sent.
• learn to distinguish between misinformation (spreading false information unknowingly), disinformation (spreading false information knowingly), and malinformation (spreading true information maliciously).
• vagueposting is to drama as honey is to flies. out of context, vague venting about a personal situation is really easy to misconstrue as statements about wider trends or groups of people. i get it, sometimes you gotta vent, but be aware of how others might read it.
• you are under no responsibility to correct or argue with a bad actor. the entire shtick of a troll is to hijack people's attention to gratify their own ego and disrupt productive conversations. irresponsibly exposing them to your own audience is doing their work for them.
• you're also under no obligation to get along with everyone. some people will just grate on you, or you on them, without anyone actually doing anything wrong and that's fine. just mute/block/silence/da-share-zone-hit-the-bricks and move on.
• everyone is on edge. shit's been real fucking rough in the world lately, and trauma and stress are not known for engendering patience or friendliness. in high-anonymity low-consequence environments online, you often see people at their worst. people say things they regret all the time, but the internet often preserves and amplifies our mistakes. sometimes just a little benefit of the doubt goes a long long way towards resolving disagreements.
• pay attention to the ways the mechanisms of a site mold your behavior. we're social animals, we're all vulnerable to the endorphin rush of a popular post or an influx of followers. dunking on someone being foolish is always going to be an easily weaponized shortcut to gain social capital, and it's important to be wary of people that make it a habit
• the red car phenomenon is very real. you gain awareness of a Thing and suddenly you start noticing the Thing everywhere. our brains tend to interpret this as the Thing being a recent/popular phenomenon, when it's really just our over-tuned pattern recognition skills seeing shapes in the clouds.
• your perspective on any given platform is limited and unique, according to both how you curate your feeds, and your life experiences. something that (seems to be) really popular or widespread in your corner of the site is not necessarily representative of the whole.

idk i might be a bit rambly but i think it's important for (especially younger) folks to keep a lot of this in mind. we're at the point where many many people have had internet access their entire lives and take mass/social media for granted, but in terms of human evolution it's still an overwhelming new thing that our brains (and global society) are struggling to adapt to. remember the fleshy fallible apes behind the keyboards and be kind.