I'm still working on getting out of all the groups that waste space. Sadly many useful things have moved to facebook, and while good for facebook (more ads), other forums function better for keeping up with my hobbies - except for the lack of people checking them.
There is way too much political outrage for sure. You just have to wade through it. Hopefully you can join me in spreading the facebook is about family message and get others to stop posting politics. (this is hard, it is so tempting to bait your political friends)
The OP's title, "Don't Let Social Media Think for You," applies in this context too. Now you can't even click "Like" without being careful -- to be fair I avoid searching political topics and other sports teams on Google unless I'm incognito.
I feel like we're increasingly trapped in a box by these algorithms and the need to keep them appeased.
Other than that, reddit was the last piece of social media that i quit last year. I consider it more of a social media service than an a forum for discussion.
Because employment, like almost everything else in life, is political[0].
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics (see definition 5 a, especially)
A good skill to cultivate for this worry is listening without interrupting or judging when you get feedback. Often what someone who feels hurt wants, regardless of the merit of that hurt, is to feel heard. Listening is timeless.
"I don't fully understand, but I hear you."
Sometimes the best you can do is get someone to move you out of their enemy bucket, but that's often enough. I'm often on the other side of that because there are parts of me that people don't get, but often feel qualified to speak on. The things they say aren't what hurt. It's the often aggressive refusal to accept the limits of their knowledge and experience that hurts. Hubris is the timeless enemy of listening.
Real-world example: there was a now-closed Mastodon instance where it came out that the admin did a long, rambly thread where she confidently explained AMAB nonbinary people are just trans women who are too cowardly to transition. There's an interesting discussion to be had on how to define "woman" and where people draw the line on identifying as nonbinary vs woman vs nonbinary woman, but it doesn't start with a thread like that.
What I do for gestures aimed at marginalizations I don't share is listen to the people they're aimed at, but that can be hard if you aren't in a community where they exist in sufficient numbers and are comfortable sharing for a broad cross-section of opinions. I didn't even know any other out and vocal queer people until I started hanging out with furries, and even they have trouble making space for people of color to be out and vocal.
I don't have a good solution to finding that cross-section, so I can see how getting off social media entirely is the safest path.
In modern parlance, your post amounts to victim blaming. You can't simultaneously engage with thousands of people in any manner that all of those thousands will find acceptable. That's always been true; the change is the belief in a large number of powerful subcultures that they have a right to be engaged with in manners they find acceptable, by people they've never heard of, in interactions they aren't really a part of except that they happened to be within broadcast range, in the worst cases that they possibly even actively sought out precisely because it would give them something to be angry about. (I'm not accusing everybody of doing that. I think it's rare, most people have better things to do with their time. But there only has to be a few to be a problem.) In the long term, this is an impossible standard.
The largest benefit of abandoning social media is probably the realization that the "very online" type don't actually dictate social mores, and can (and should) be largely ignored. That feeling that the Twitter mob can tell you what is acceptable is "[letting] social media think for you", and is exactly the problem.
Those with strong offline relationships tend not to have time to participate in these communities enough to influence them.
I find the media is particularly egregious in giving these voices an outsized level of influence because journalists are lazy and source stories on Twitter and try to manufacture drama and page views. But this media is consumed by “less online” people which contributes to the view that those opinions are more prevalent than they really are.
In a war if the leader has to select an army of thinkers & intellectuals versus that of fanatics & fundamentalists, which one will he choose?
What makes the "grey" opinion "more valid"?
"Grey opinions" are essentially the opposite of sensationalized. I'm not the original commenter, but if I read them correctly, I believe they mean that the least sensational and most deliberate opinions are more likely to fully account for the truth of the matter (and hence be "more" valid) than those opinions which sensationalize.
So if that's what a grey opinion is... then yeah. That's more valid. Especially if you value conversations aimed at exploring some reality rather than performative shouting matches.