Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens – Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ralph Hertwig, 2023

I guess my strategy of not having social media, not commenting, and getting offline to read books is a pretty extreme form of critical ignoring.

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention.
— Read on journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214221121570