It depends on the social media and the filter bubble, if any, you've surrounded yourself with, and whether it's part of the "culture war".

If you talk about the wretched conditions in Yemen, you don't need very much courage, because you're unlikely to be attacking anyone who is listening, or threatening anyone's core beliefs who is listening, because most people don't have strong polarized core beliefs about the conflict in Yemen.

It's positively awful though. It's hard to know how to intervene in a positive way, but we should be talking about it much more.

You do need courage when you're going to try to address injustice in a strongly worded way and either contradict the other tribe in a context without overwhelming support from your tribe, or you're going to betray your own tribe. You gave examples of both, in your own case. Alas.

It doesn't matter what's right, here, for the most part, because people are observably running on tribal unity reasoning most of the time. This is most evident when the reality of the situation is, objectively, about as clear as mud (e.g. Depp vs Heard), and you see polarized groups "courageously" repeating their side's unsupportable but fervently-held biases; or when the reality of the situation is, objectively, very conflicted (e.g. Israel / Hamas+Palestinians) and you see polarized groups "courageously" repeating their exceedingly selective version of events.

Given that, there's a problem with being mean (or un-nice).

The problem is that the rules of tribal unity are that you are highly forgiving of you tribe and highly critical of others. Being "mean" directly suggests, "oh, time to turn on tribe-mode"!

A lot of times, this is completely counterproductive, because opposition is rallied in direct proportion to the loss of niceness. Nothing is accomplished save a bunch of belligerence.

So while there is a considerable extent to which "nice" is, especially for women, supposed to be synonymous with "pushover" and "timid" and "self-sacrificing", you can't really look at the non-nice insult-filled shouting matches between men (for whom there is less pressure to be "nice") and conclude that this is what one should aspire to.

"Nice" also means things like "taking into account others' needs and wishes" and "being respectful whenever possible" and "expecting and rewarding the best from people even while protecting oneself and others from the worst". (Note that this overlaps some with, but is not exactly the same as, being kind.) Losing that isn't a good idea. That's the lubrication that makes consensus possible, and when consensus is possible, getting it, rather than fighting it out, is far superior, because, among other things, you can spend a large portion of effort on solutions and a small portion of effort on squabbling.

So I think the situation is a lot more complicated than "nice was the problem; turn it off", which you don't exactly say, but you sure hint at a lot.

It's very easy to fall into virtuous-feeling non-"nice" tribally-aligned battles which cause collateral damage and do not, overall, accomplish even as much as timid self-sacrifice. I don't advocate for timid self-sacrifice at all; the point is only that it is not hard to do even worse.