Can I post good news in bad times?

Once again, people online are struggling to process real life.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, my social media feed became, as it often does during moments of societal crisis, unusable. The Supreme Court Decision had been a long time coming, so I had pre-mourned the desecration of my rights. When the push alert finally landed on my phone, I allowed myself the initial gut punch, but was then ready to move forward. My feed, however, was not. 

Every time I opened Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter, I was confronted with post after post about things I already knew: the gender breakdown of those who made the decision, how many women this would affect, the deaths it could result in, and on and on. But this information wasn’t just coming from news outlets or experts. It was appearing in infographics from brands I followed, in Stories from friends from college, and infiltrating its way into regular posts from people who wanted to share something else but felt they couldn’t not acknowledge it.