I'm not saying they don't happen, what I'm saying is if you immerse yourself in a constant stream of "here's a bad thing that happened to one person out of the dozens of millions of people who created content on the Internet today", you'll get a really distorted view of what's actually happening. It's like never leaving your house because you see shootings and murder reports every day on local news. You're missing out on a whole lot because of the distorted view that kind of information diet gives you.
This is the sad part.
If your news diet is consumed by negative press and sad stories, they become more readily available[0] to you and can affect your decisions adversely by making you think that the base rate of such bad events are more common than they really are[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
Is the idea that the NBC San Diego branch just ... made this up? That the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h) fabricated this wholesale? Let's just click through some of those hyperlinks in the Unherd thing. https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col... sure seems to have happened; take care to note "I've offended many people with this post, and for that I am deeply sorry. Please read my comment here. And 01.12 Please read my follow-up about what’s wrong with this post here."
These are all things that have occurred in "reality" and the "real world," to use your diction. You can now ignore them -- feel free! -- but pretending that they didn't happen is, I don't know, a performance only for yourself, because I cannot unsee what has been seen.
I am not terrified; as above, I pointed out that the potential negatives outweigh the possible benefits at this point. It's a simple analysis. You have elected not to factor those real world events into your analysis.