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?
Unfortunately, posts that do include the keyword in the text but not in the title, still get through. Case in point, this one.
Some apps/frontends have keyword filters, could just filter out the word “Trump” as a way of trimming down the feed.
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.
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.
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…
If you use the Google feed in pixel launcher, add the keywords you want to block.
That was the first thing i did 2016…
“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.
Would you like 5️ times per day updates on all the inane and to you entirely unrelatable and irrelevant day to day details of what the politicians in germany do or say? No?
Well tough shit it is now on every official news outlet, plastered over the internet and social media, and referenced anywhere you might come in contact with germans. You also get constant reminders that you should care about this despite the fact that you can’t vote in Germany and the fact that german domestic politics have zero effect on your existence.
Except what the leader of Germany decides to do doesn’t generally affect the entire planet. At the same time if the leader of Germany was a racist, sexist, fascist, bigoted piece of shit hell bent on becoming a dictator I’d wanna know about every detail.
Whatever trump does inside the united states doesn’t affect me. If he is closing or opening borders, if he is shitting his diapers, if he is dropping yet another incoherent ramble about something, doesnt matter to me at all.
This doesnt mean I wish to be ignorant of what foreign policies he pursues, it just means I dont need the constant barrage of irrelevant outrage.
E: also, we have our own right wingers gathering strength, why is that not of utmost importance to you as you say? Perhaps because it is irrelevant to you?
