I have the good fortune to have interacted with many different communities during my life - conservative/liberal, working class/well off, urban/rural, religious/secular, etc. I ended up being facebook friends with a lot of these people, and it used to be a semi-decent distraction when I needed a short break from whatever I was doing. People posted pictures of their travels, social events, kids, etc; and it provided a glimpse into the daily lives of people living a very different life than me, which I found interesting.

However, I feel like lately it's gotten completely insane. There were always some people I hid because I knew their beliefs and just had no desire to see them constantly repeated in my feed, but lately more and more people seem emboldened to post things that are fairly disturbing to read. For example, the most recent time I checked facebook, I saw a Breitbart article arguing that there should be a low maximum cap on the number of women and girls who study math and science, since they drop out in large numbers as a result of not being good at it, why waste resources on them. As somebody who has taught in a very male-dominated, mathematical subject, I just can't even. Another post, on Holocaust Remembrance Day no less, about how anyone who gets an abortion - for any reason - is committing a worse sin than the guards who exterminated Jews at Auschwitz. And this is after already hiding many people. I also have friends at the opposite end of the political spectrum who are freaking out about what is happening and posting an overwhelming number of stories about how horrible things are. And there is tons of arguing between people of different views, with seemingly no progress made in anyone changing how they think.

Honestly, I look at social media and it feels like things in the U.S. have completely gone off the rails. Are other people experiencing this, or do I just have an atypical set of social media friends? Anybody left social media - I don't want to be ignorant of what's going on but at the same time it is not a very pleasant distraction.