Ohmygod, you are never going to believe what Donald Trump said on Twitter this morning! It sounded like it was written by an extremely racist and unusually stupid seven-year-old; nevertheless, it has already had a million retweets and 15 gazillion replies, and inspired approximately 10bn thinkpieces.

That, my friends, is what you call an evergreen story. Every single day, the president of the US tweets bigoted and factually incorrect nonsense, and every single day, his tweets seem to constitute 50% of the news; we are stuck in a hellish groundhog day that rotates around Trump’s verbal diarrhoea. Important issues get shoved to the sidelines as we argue about whether Trump’s latest racist comment means he is a racist (spoiler: yes), hypothesise about what “covfefe” signifies or cackle over typos such as “Prince of Whales”.

I am obviously far from the only person being driven to distraction by the president’s antisocial media habit. On Sunday, Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut, tweeted that he was unfollowing the president “because his feed is the most hate-filled, racist, and demeaning of the 200+ I follow and it regularly ruins my day to read it. So I’m just going to stop.” His announcement started a small movement; Twitter users began urging the president’s 62.4 million followers to emulate Murphy and #unfollowTrump.

While unfollowing Trump may seem like a tiny gesture, it is actually a big deal. Size matters to Trump. He is obsessed with his ratings and social media metrics. According to the Daily Beast, he frequently complains about having fewer Twitter followers than Barack Obama – who has 107.4 million. This has nothing to do with the fact he is less popular than Obama, of course; rather, the president has tweeted that Twitter is biased against conservatives and stops people from following his account (this is nonsense). Trump also reportedly spent a large portion of an April meeting with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, complaining that the platform limits his followers (this, again, is nonsense). If enough people unfollowed him, it would deal a huge blow to his fragile ego.

I also think it is worth remembering that there is nothing positive to be gained by following or engaging with Trump on Twitter. The only reason I’m spelling it out is that a large number of people appear to labour under the delusion that retweeting the president and attaching a snarky comment constitutes an act of #resistance. It doesn’t. All publicity is good publicity for a guy like Trump. The same is true, by the way, for the likes of Nigel Farage, who owes his high profile to the media’s endless attention. In a recent cover interview for Campaign, an advertising trade magazine, Farage laughed about a New York Times headline calling him “the most dangerous man in Britain”. “I loved it,” he said. “I’d have paid for advertising like that.”

It’s easy to feel helpless about the state of the world. But there are simple things that we can all be doing to take back control, and unfollowing Trump is one of them. Most of the world isn’t on Twitter, and when Trump’s tweets are elevated into mainstream news, we are helping spread his vile statements. We’re doing his work for him. We’re complicit.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist