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?
I think they blocked in all and this community is subbed?
Unfortunately, posts that do include the keyword in the text but not in the title, still get through. Case in point, this one.
It’s true, it also doesn’t block images that have these words, but you filter more than 90% of the posts that you wouldn’t want to see.
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.
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…
Some apps/frontends have keyword filters, could just filter out the word “Trump” as a way of trimming down the feed.
Thanks, I’m using voyager and am filtering some keywords already. While it helps a good bit on here, I guess I’m more looking for an ad block extension for Firefox, but for trump and trump adjacent content. Ideally something that includes what his business partners and associates in the government are up to.
Hi, if you’re on Android I can recommend Blokada5. Get the 5.21.0 version from a mirror because newer versions (the only ones you find on the play store) will only give you one month and then force you to upgrade your account.
As an ad blocker it works for your entire phone, not just Firefox. I don’t have any adblockers for my browsers.
I’ve used the Spoiler Protection 2.0 extension in the past, though it hasn’t been updated in a long time so there may be a better option.
It doesn’t block content but places a big red overlay over links, headlines, images (that are tagged) and videos. It’s not fool proof but definitely useful if you want to block “Trump” or “Musk” or whatever else.
Good luck
I posted a guide last year on how to do it on Eternity for Lemmy:
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.
