For fuck’s sake, limit social media to an hour a day. Every political reel you see doesn’t need to become your personality.
I am someone who actively tries to stay away from social media, and obviously I do fail, but I think some people out there are getting too affected by it, especially young people aged 16–22 getting exposed to all this political content before even figuring out how to form opinions based on facts.
We as a country don’t really have a rich history of journalism, just a few journalists trying to fight the good fight while others like treating India as some sort of reality show.
Fearmongering is the easiest way to get views. Earlier, it used to be just news channels, and young people didn’t really watch them. But now every Instagram model becomes an activist as soon as a protest starts, and if you talk to them, all you’ll hear is “someone is doing this, someone is doing that,” and yes, they saw it on Instagram.
They lie so much that they’ve started believing their own lies, and now both they and their followers are so hardcoded with their ideologies, either left or right, that they’ll defend their side no matter what. If their leaders are even accused of murder, their first thought isn’t “who was the victim?” or “I hope the family is okay.” It’s directly “this is a rumour the other side started.”
It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on. Form your opinions based on facts, not Instagram reels, and ffs realise that you don’t owe anything to these political parties. You should have your own belief system, be it free markets, big government, free speech or anything else, and then vote for the party that has a history of acting in line with your beliefs.
P.S. As a healthy activity, try swearing at every political leader out loud just to remember that I don’t work for them, they work for me.