Personal content filtering is the new adblock
How we can transform the way we consume media
For the tldr hackers:
Problem: We are floded with too many trashy news, we should filter them like we do with adblocker. Thus:
Solution: Install tempermonkey, Install the script and adjust the keywords that you don’t want to see in your news. Now these will be filtered out while you browse the website.
For all the others that want some context:
People say: “You are what you consume”, that counts not only for food but also for media. As a news addict for me this historically meant I was a raccoon: I weeded daily through a sea of trashy news, memes and videos and picked some that I valued and shared them with friends.
Since most of us consume their media either through social media or through newspapers that reflect our world view, we have become trapped in our own ideological prison that we cannot smell or see. *Including the mandatory Zizek sniff and noserub here*.
And this exposure is taking a toll on us collectively. We seem to be under constant perceived stress sensing that e.g. our rights are under attack, that the governments doesn’t care about us, that inflation is going to eat up our savings and the war in Ukraine will spread and so on. Even the Times is asking: “Is it bad for you to read the news constantly?”
Well someone smug could say, you are just consuming the wrong type of news. Just change your newspaper. But upon further investigation we all know that the concentration of media ownership has lead to a more uniform voice that is simply repeated in all of the outlets of a media house. Not for conspiracy but simply for efficiency.
And after all most newspapers anyway rely on the same input channels such as AP in the USA, or DPA in Germany or SDA in Switzerland.
After all you could say: Well for me the news don’t play such a big role - I have made up my mind how the world works, I am not influenced by the news that I consume. But lets be honest: Everything you think you know about the current world you know from news. You know why Putin is so terribly wrong invading the Ukraine or why its a bad thing that the UK left Euro, or why its a bad thing for the monarchy that Prince talked to Oprah.
News offers orientation and pre-chews the complexity of the world for us so we don’t have to think. We simply adopt a preformed opion, because its more efficient this way.
So there is really no way out of this conondrum: You want somehow to be informed but you don’t want to deal with the dumpster fire that news have become. Now you are asking yourself: what are my options if I just don’t want to live as a hermit in a cave.
Here are 4 of my solutions to consuming news in the 21st century
0.Acknowledge that you are not in control 24/7
There is the simple observation that we are not always in full control of what we do, especially not when we are consuming news. Taylor Pearson, explains a method in his blog on what we can do about it. He names it the “Bucky” Method (named after Buckminster Fuller).
This method is build on the idea that we think fast and slow, something that Kahneman has documented well in his book. According to him we have two modes of thinking:
The fast mode of thinking that we use for daily operations. We mostly use this way of thinking.
And the slow way of thinking that we use for planing or solving problems. We rarely use the slow thinking one.
So the “Bucky“ method goes like this:
You pretend you have two personalities: The “investor you” and the “worker you”.
The “investor you” decides on what you should invest your time on. He then builds a “machine” (system) that the worker you operates on a daily basis.
The “worker your” then uses this plan as your daily routine, aka your daily grind. This helps the “worker you” because you don’t have to think what do do next. You simply live your day, brush your teeth and do your job.
Every now and then the investor you re-evaluates how well these systems work and then he adjusts these. e.g. creates a new morning sport routine, or in our case create a system on how to consume your news.
1. Get off the news cycle
So the most radical thing that we could do is simply not read news at all, but stick to books instead, especially the classic ones that have prevailed the test of time. After all these might tell you something about the world that is universal and could be applied in your day to day life or could simply bring you joy.
But often we find it immensely hard to “just” pick up abook. Instead we mindlessly scroll through a little bit more of social media junk or news of the day. My theory is that we already start these activities with a very low energy level (after a stressfull day at work) and then drain it even further, but giving us this sweet instant gratification. This then depletes our domamine levels even further. So in our daily lives we never even make it to the levels that are needed to pick up a book.
We pick up our phone more than 150 times a day, often we pretend that we “just” want to check the time, but then we end up checking some whatsapps, emails, etc.. After all our phone is a bit designed like a slot machine. So this leads to the fact that we spend roughly 3 hours staring at our phone, out of which a huge percentage is spent on news and media. Some companies like Tiktok have understood this and are capitalizing on our short attention span.
2. Try to keep your balance
Aristoteles has already figured out a long time ago that there is some virtue in the golden mean. Its not rocket science to figure out that too much of something or too little is not good for us. This applies very much to our news consumption. So we need to build a system that keeps us in place.
One system that I use is a very simple browser plugin called Leech Block. You give yourself a daily limit on how much you want to spend on news. Every time you visit a news site a clock starts ticking down. Once you have used up this time you will have to wait for tomorrow.
Maybe this feels very drastic and will feel like you are really limiting yourself too much. But give it a week or month and you will realize that its quite doable to stay inside your self set window per day. For me its 30min.
You can be even more drastic by totally banning some sites that really drain you of your energy or upset you by being so full of trash. For me its 9gag.com or 20min.ch. This setting will stop you from using your “muscle memory” when you mindlessly start typing these addresses into your browser window.
3. Create opportunities to look beyond national media
Normally its really hard to realize that people in other countries might have a totally different opinion on a topic. Good examples are universal healthcare - totally acceptable in Europe and the rest of the world, but considered socialist monstrosity in the US. Other examples: Gun control, same sex marriage, pacifism etc… Nations often actually differ on topics and it feels like a breath of fresh air to read different opinions side by side.
Eurotopics.net is a good example of a website that allows you to do this peaking very easy for the german speaking public. They translate all the news from major newspapers in German and provide you with excerpts that you can click on. Often you will find that opinions differ wildly how major events should be interpreted. Give it a try. It might feel a bit boring at the beginning because there is so little tabloid content on the website.
4. Filter the news by content
Finally we have come to the point which I wanted to discuss with you in the first place. News content filtering. After all you don’t always want to stay in the safe zones of media abstinence, books and highly curated news. You want the real deal.
We can filter the news websites that we visit by content like we are filtering them with adblockers already. The technology is the same and it is even accepted by the German Supreme court or Apple as being a legal thing to do.
So its really only a little step to filter websites by content by simply blocking or removing content pieces that you dont want to see. So I wrote a simple greasemonkey script that does just that. Greasemonkey is a browser plugin available for any major browser desktop and mobile, that allows you as a user to manipulate the website that you are seeing right now. So in our case we will be removing “<divs>” aka. Articles that contain news we don’t want to see. How does it work?
Here is an example of a couple of keywords that ended up in my blacklist. Mostly highly prominent celebrities that pop up everywhere, followed by some topics that I don’t have the time and mental capacity to dive into such as FIFA worldcup, corona or the ukraine war. The script searches each article for these words and if it finds one, i tsimply makes the whole div invisible, leaving a gaping hole in the website. I think it is actually nice to see those holes, because you realize that you have removed a significant trash proportion of the page.
The nice thing about the script is, that you can even extend it and match it to the news website that you use the most. Simply find a css selector in which most of the articles are wrapped and add it to the list. There is even a very handy chrome extension that lets you find these css selectors if you don’t understand how they work.
Take back control
With these four simple hacks you can take back control on what you see and perceive about reality in your news consumption. I hope that this will help you to become less anxious or stressed about the world. After all we all make our own reality.
Discussion: Is this cancel culture?
An interesting topic is if these measures can be perceived as the rather negatively framed cancel culture. This “culture” is not really well defined but somehow about “cancelling” things that we don’t want to see. How does our filtering approach differ? Here are my 5 cent on this:
Cancel culture wants to cancel individuals as a group movement, while news filtering feels more like a personal preference. There is little activism involved in updating your filter list.
Cancel culture wants to take away your platform e.g. Twitter ban / “deplatforming”. News filtering couldn’t care less if trump is on Twitter or not, we simply ommit him by filtering him out.
Cancel culture wants to silence speakers e.g. shouting over speakers in university. News filtering is a silent approach that lets everyone speak and we just listen more selectively.
So maybe you are sold on this concept and want to give it a try.
How to install on desktop
Install the greasemonkey browser extension, it takes 5seconds
Go to the scripts homepage on greasyfork and click on the download button
To adjust your blacklist, just click on the monkey icon > then on remove unwanted news > Then edit.
Now find the part where you can edit the keywords. Adjust them to your liking. Make sure to put each one in parentheses and with a | in between.
How to install on mobile
Install Userscripts on your phone through the app store.
Setup a usersscripts directory and download the script to your phone.
Now when you surf your website you will see a small icon and the news will be filtered out:
