Last holiday season, as I was innocently attempting to enjoy the spirit of Christmas cheer, the same Tweet kept popping up on my timeline again and again. It was a link to this Daily Mirror article, whose title declared with disgust "People say Santa should now be female or gender neutral sparking debate."

At first, I just scrolled past the link, thinking it was pretty ridiculous (and missing the comma it would need to make grammatical sense). But I have a terrible habit of reading the replies on viral Tweets, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who values their sanity, so, after the third time it showed up on my feed, I scrolled down. And wow, were people angry.

I was shocked to see that what I had so quickly glossed over as a clickbait-y non-issue was causing so much genuine outrage. To many, it was seen as the proof that feminists and the LGBT community wanted to change everything they held dear. The responses were littered with cries of "now they've gone too far!" and "typical snowflakes," many of which were garnering dozens, if not hundreds, of likes.

Of course, few, if any, people actually have deep-seated feelings about Santa's gender identity. In fact, a headline starting with "People say" means virtually nothing. You can find someone who will say literally anything and since Twitter (while also being my favorite thing ever) is a garbage pit of humanity, it won't even be that hard. And the article, for the record, was describing a survey in which people had specifically been asked ways to modernize the character, prompting the gender comment in the first place. But none of that mattered. The simple suggestion that something as benign as Santa Claus was being questioned was enough to throw people into a fit of anger at those pesky social justice warriors they assumed were out to ruin their favorite holiday.

This phenomenon of getting angry at pointless things while ignoring real issues is referred to either as outrage tactics or manufactured outrage, and it is at once incredibly effective and incredibly dangerous. If people are associating women's issues or LGBT issues with a debate on Santa's gender, they are going to write those movements off as pointless and petty. Meanwhile, actual issues like the high murder rate for transgender women (especially transgender women of color) or the lack of women in high-power professional positions go unaddressed and ignored by the common populace.

Outrage tactics are employed all the time, from the so-called "war on Christmas" to Tucker Carlson getting really mad about "racist trees." And on some level I get why they're so convincing; people genuinely like to be angry. It gives us a sense of moral superiority over those that we feel have wronged us in some way. But if we are ever going to be able to confront some of the issues plaguing us as a society, we have to resist the urge to get so caught up in the silly viral moments that we forget about them in the first place.