I approach social media (twitter in particular) this way: “try to be a good neuron”. Meaning: social media forms a global hive mind. It determines what a lot o

I approach social media (twitter in particular) this way: “try to be a good neuron”. Meaning: social media forms a global hive mind. It determines what a lot of people see and hear about the world. Witness the flare up recently over the influence of “fake news” going viral. A neuron's role, as one tiny piece of a brain, a neural network, or, for my purposes, a hive mind, is to take in a number of inputs and filter them, firing occasionally to convey some distillation of the inputs received. Anyone who reshares highly inaccurate or incendiary content is being a bad neuron. If instead you gather a range of news and opinion from a variety of sources and then, being very selective, reshare the one or two things each day (or week) with the best combinations of reputability, newsworthiness, timeliness, importance to current problems society is facing, and exploration of new ideas, then you're being a good neuron. This in my opinion is the best use of publicly shared social media. If lots of people did this the world would be better off. There may be career risk in sharing things related to politics, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. Without the freedom to do that, I might as well be in a repressive totalitarian society, and now more than ever that is something we should fight to prevent.