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.
I have filters for Trump and Elon and others myself. It seems to be only for the post title because I can still see posts like this. Which I'm okay with by the way. I just don't need all the additional articles specifically featuring them.
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.
You can also use uBlock origin for that. You just need to make custom filter, and use GPT to figure out exactly what kind of code to write in that box. Different sites call their headlines with different names, so it may require some tweaking.
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...
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.
"How do I bury my head in the sand and act like none of this is real?"
This is what everyone who says shit like this sounds like. I get that it's not your country but the fact remains that it's still going to effect you as well.
Why should I willingly expose myself to a firehose of increasingly terrifying news that I can do absolutely nothing about? The only possible outcome of consuming that media is increased anxiety and stress on a personal level, so I want to limit my exposure.
I’m sure if anything important happens, I’ll pick it up through osmosis anyway.