By: Riley Burridge
These days, it seems like having a healthy skepticism toward the news or the “other side” is the new normal. Sure, you can’t please everyone, but how did we get to the point where it seems almost everyone agrees we have a social media problem? In a time when it feels like nobody can agree on anything, most agree on this: the U.S. is more polarized we can remember.
The first step to easing that tension is shifting from critical thinking to critical ignoring. And no, this does not mean burying your head in the sand. The idea is not to ignore the issues shaping the news. It is about getting the facts without falling down a rabbit hole.
Critical thinking has been drilled into us our whole lives. Social media, however, has warped it. The deeper you dive into a topic online, the more your algorithm figures out your views and nudges you toward the extreme. Suddenly, the other side is not just wrong, they can seem completely unrecognizable.
Take the tragic events in Minnesota in January. A human life lost has become the first political outrage of 2026. The deeper people dug online, the more polarized the conversation became. Both sides were convinced they were right, and the way they described the same event could make you think it was two completely different incidents.
Passion and empathy are good, but obsession and constant justification are not. That is where critical ignoring comes in. Instead of diving headfirst into every tweet, thread, or article, check the basics, take a pulse of the conversation, and then step back.
Social media is designed to grab your attention and your emotions. Critical ignoring gives you the power to understand an issue on your own terms without getting sucked into arguments that go nowhere. Learn the facts, understand opposing views, form an opinion, put the phone down, and process your emotions in healthy ways. Critical ignoring is not ignorance. It is self-preservation in the age of outrage.