I, too, find striking the balance between staying informed and protecting myself from negativity to be daunting, disheartening, and frequently unrealistic.
What helped me was my coincidental transition to services that have little or no “algorithmic” influence, such as switching to Lemmy/Mastodon. It requires me to be more intentional with my willing exposure to content, at the cost of being less convenient to find new content.
Like, I don’t get as many new songs in my playlists since I jumped out of Spotify. It means I need to get creative in order to try new artists, but I’m not hitting the skip button as much, either.