The last time Trump won, there was this constant barrage of scandals and frankly horrifying news permeating my online experience. And while I admit that from my European perspective, there was some entertainment in the whole thing, the experience was more exhausting than anything else.
I like to keep up with the news, but I also like my mental health. Are there any effective strategies for keeping the amount of trump-spam I’m exposed to at an absolute minimum, while also keeping up with whatever else is going on in the world?
I have a filter on, I block the words “Elon”, “Kamala” and “Trump”. Furthermore I block politics community. It’s not like they are about anything else than US politics anyway.
Legitimate question, did you temporarily disable it, or did it just not manage to block this post because those words aren’t in the title?
There are still some news sites that publish an RSS feed, build an aggregator and filter out words you don’t like
Thats actually a cool idea, I’m learning rust these days, and building a personal news feed feels like a doable project with a ton of useful lessons built in. Thanks!
sure. what i did was get a list of common words, remove them from the headlines, and remove the words i didn’t care for, then group the news items by ‘topic’. most readers/aggregators just iterate the headlines by source. the reason i removed ‘trump’ from my news feed during his first presidency was because there were wayyyy too many news stories then. i’m sure it will happen again next year. i felt so much more calmer after snipping those headlines out. i just did headlines, you can do article summary/content too but it’s much more work especially if you want to parse feeds every minute. The funnest thing is finding out many of the news agencies must not realize their draft articles hit their RSS feed before they are published on their site, you may see odd headlines like “Fat woman gets mad at McDonalds” or something off the wall, then later they write a proper headline when they finish the article.
Some apps/frontends have keyword filters, could just filter out the word “Trump” as a way of trimming down the feed.
I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…
This problem has already been solved by content filtering. You can make your own filtering system, or you can just use a browser plugin like the famous Make The Internet Great Again which filters out all Trump related News articles.
Thanks, I’ll look into what the Firefox extension community has. For now I figure I’ll go down to the pub, have a pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.
If you use the Google feed in pixel launcher, add the keywords you want to block.
That was the first thing i did 2016…
