I would like to block all political news online from showing up while reading/researching stuff online. What are tips, methods and techniques that i can employ to block such news/content?
You can block explicitly political stuff (I've seen some filter lists floating around that purport to do this for Google), but it will be hard to block implicitly political stuff without blocking 50% of the internet.<p>As an easy example: looking up where to get a booster shot for COVID-19? That's very political, at least in the US.
First you say 'news' but then you say 'news/content'. I assume you mean like political parties and left/right politics, and not any topic that's political, since discussions of personal privacy and control of information flow, like this post, are political.
How is it possible to know if something is political or not? It's a spectrum, sometimes things are highly political and other times only lightly or mildly so.
There’s no acceptable definition of “politics” when even basic, science informed medical advice can be political.<p>Instead I think it’s more productive to change your news diet away from histrionic, click bait to more reasonable sources that offer balanced perspectives. Then you can engage your curiosity about a topic with different perspectives rather than your reptilian, tribal “us vs them” brain that exemplifies most media.
i would like to go even wider and just block all news sites as they tend to push political agendas from their prospective which mostly is filled with speculation that often causes unnecessary stress
This is an alternative solution but I would recommend getting an RSS reader because controlling where you consume content from can greatly reduce how much political content you’re exposed to
this is more a hygiene and habits question . sit down weekly and review your habits like where you are spending your time and what apps you are wasting time on . then prune the low quality experiences .<p>you’ll also have to be willing to cut some good things out . like uninstalling twitter which is probably 90% unhealthy and 10% constructive content<p>you don’t need to read news or politics more than once a month . most of it is drama and regurgitation rather than developments and trends<p>as for tools you can use adblock custom filters to hide political banners but the ROI is low . install pihole and you can blacklist domains . the awesome lightweight list links to text only news which can help reduce news cravings<p><a href="https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites</a><p>when you do a review ask yourself “is this edifying “ and if not delete it
Essentially impossible to do especially if you're researching things. However, a list that's helped for me re: basic browsing, and reducing the amount of politics to non-incendiary low amount levels:<p>- Delete accounts with twitter/tumblr/insta/social media. Twitter especially is a cesspool of people who want to be miserable and/or mad.<p>- Opt for hand-built sites, tightly curated RSS feeds from non-political blogs, or discord servers that have a strong resistance to those topics. It'll take some searching. I tend to keep my interests around pretty and/or sleazy art.<p>- Using HN as the "daily newspaper" - if there's no article in the top three slots that have to do with real world events, it's a slow news day and nothing big/bad happened.
Perhaps a web extension could block such content, in a similar style to ad blocking.<p>Alternatively, you could utilise a closed set of resources: Dev docs, offline manuals, StackOverflow, man pages, arxiv, wikipedia, etc.<p>Wide platforms appear to inevitable blue the lines.
You could naively block certain domains, authors and keywords. However it's incredibly difficult to determine if a piece of media has political motivation without interpreting the entire text.<p>Politics also overlaps with morality, philosophy, society, ethics... so having a stance or discussing any issue could be viewed as politically motivated content.<p>Persuasive writing is especially political. As the author defines their stance on a topic, they will inevitably leak their political beliefs in their expression...
The internet is a communication medium. It exists to deliver information between people. Since all communication is political, this by definition cannot be done.<p>Fortunately or unfortunately, you'll have to learn to get along with the other humans on the planet. This is called politics.
More than likely you’d need to write your own plug-in and start filtering things, have bots scan front pages of top news sites and their political sections and help guide the ML that way.<p>It’s not easy, but I’m sure it’s doable as the big G and others have done much more sophisticated analysis.
I don’t click on any political links, and never have, so search engines, FB etc have pretty much stopped offering me any such links.<p>alexfromapex’s RSS suggestion is a good one too — I primarily use RSS for finding articles.
What's political?<p>"Humans are the likely culprit of rising global average temperatures" Is that political?<p>"COVID-19 vaccine side effects" Is that political?<p>"June 4th, 1989" Is that political?<p>"Russia" Is that political?<p>"Q" Is that political?
Maybe pihole regex based ruleset?
Or a list of sites that can be added. It may not block videos from YouTube, it might simply not let you visit particular websites.
I was able to do it somewhat on Twitter. There is a disallow list that you can add entries into. Every time you see a tweet that seems political, find the key word and add it to the list. Trump / Biden / red / blue / gun and so on.
You can’t really. Especially US politics.<p>Even on stuff like stock ticker boards there are always people that insist on bringing up Biden/Trump etc
It is a mighty high privilege to be so comfortable in the world that you can safely ignore politics. I would recommend analyzing that comfort and what it says about your position.