Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
There’s a genocide going on with what appears to be more or less the full support of the countries that make up the defence union my country is a part of.
There’s war in Europe.
I find those topics worthy of discussion, and any social media where this is not actively discussed seems to me to be a smokescreen more than anything.
Of course tragic realities like the genocide we are complacent in, climate change, war in Europe, Russian propaganda and the rise of the far right is going to be actively discussed. It concerns more or less everyone who uses this platform, and they are the most important issues of our time. It’s not about negativity, it’s about coming to terms with reality and seeking to understand it.
That said, the communities I follow are largely apolitical stuff that interests me. Woodworking, knitting, gardening, owls, art, and the Fediverse. With the exception of [email protected] and [email protected], I let the political stuff come through the cracks rather than actively following it.
I also have a Piefed account on which I follow news communities but actively filter out Trump and Musk. I can see how Amercians still feel the need to talk about these men, but at the end of the day they’re just fascist attention whores.