Ask HN: How to block all political content from showing up online?

40 points by rakshithbellare 4 years ago | 37 comments

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?

cmeacham98 4 years ago |

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.

As an easy example: looking up where to get a booster shot for COVID-19? That's very political, at least in the US.

postsantum 4 years ago | |

>without blocking 50% of the internet

Your terms are acceptable

Semiapies 4 years ago | | |

Now enjoy spending a vast amount of effort finding which 50% of the billions of web pages have political content.

tintedfireglass 4 years ago | | |

Which 50% to block is the problem. Which one is politics which one is not is controversial. Is politics related only to what government is doing?Then what about religion? Is that not political? If all that is political is VIM vs EMACS or WINDOWS vs MACOS also considered political in IT circles? Its almost impossible to decide where a line can be drawn, but even if you want to draw a custom jagged line for yourself then its going to take you years to do so and even then it wont be perfect as human mindsets keep changing and what was apolitical a few years ago can suddenly become a very POLARIZING topic(eg.Vaccines).

mikkergp 4 years ago | | |

It’s not as high as I’d like, but I’ll take it.

mikkergp 4 years ago |

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.

rakshithbellare 4 years ago | |

I don't watch tv news, don' t check Google news. The only news i see is from the weird political PR hash tags on twitter on the explore page.

But generally i don't want to see/read stuff that's political news(stuff that a party is doing, some political goon getting arrested.etc) unless i am seeking for it

metadat 4 years ago |

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.

garyfirestorm 4 years ago | |

For eg. Yesterday’s F1 race was won by xxx. Here’s how you build a deck in backyard Here’s how you tune your audio system. Best ikea furniture hacks. I’m guessing OP just wants this kinda stuff.

1270018080 4 years ago | | |

So, ads?

kelseyfrog 4 years ago | |

A massive and continually updated discriminative dataset used to train a language classification model. Build and update continually via mturk or similar and retrain daily. Audit raters (itr) periodically to ensure they're finding signal or at least not disagreeing.

softwaredoug 4 years ago |

There’s no acceptable definition of “politics” when even basic, science informed medical advice can be political.

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.

tonymet 4 years ago | |

what would be some examples. all the mainstream media outlets are heavily biased. on tv cnn, msnbc, major networks. in print washpo, nyt all very biased. I'm having a hard time thinking of a moderate publication or channel

questiondev 4 years ago |

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

tintedfireglass 4 years ago | |

> 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

i would like to go even wider and just block all news sites

Fixed it

alexfromapex 4 years ago |

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

tonymet 4 years ago |

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 .

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

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

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

https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites

when you do a review ask yourself “is this edifying “ and if not delete it

tonymet 4 years ago | |

here is an example filter ruleset and you can find others on github. https://github.com/AllanChain/politics-filter

it’s nascent but with a few more contributors it should be usable

kradeelav 4 years ago |

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:

- Delete accounts with twitter/tumblr/insta/social media. Twitter especially is a cesspool of people who want to be miserable and/or mad.

- 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.

- 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.

bathtiles 4 years ago |

Perhaps a web extension could block such content, in a similar style to ad blocking.

Alternatively, you could utilise a closed set of resources: Dev docs, offline manuals, StackOverflow, man pages, arxiv, wikipedia, etc.

Wide platforms appear to inevitable blue the lines.

gitgud 4 years ago |

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.

Politics also overlaps with morality, philosophy, society, ethics... so having a stance or discussing any issue could be viewed as politically motivated content.

Persuasive writing is especially political. As the author defines their stance on a topic, they will inevitably leak their political beliefs in their expression...

ElevenLathe 4 years ago |

The internet is a communication medium. It exists to deliver information between people. Since all communication is political, this by definition cannot be done.

Fortunately or unfortunately, you'll have to learn to get along with the other humans on the planet. This is called politics.

planarhobbit 4 years ago |

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.

It’s not easy, but I’m sure it’s doable as the big G and others have done much more sophisticated analysis.

dannyeei 4 years ago |

I would pay for this

gumby 4 years ago |

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.

alexfromapex’s RSS suggestion is a good one too — I primarily use RSS for finding articles.

lwansbrough 4 years ago |

What's political?

"Humans are the likely culprit of rising global average temperatures" Is that political?

"COVID-19 vaccine side effects" Is that political?

"June 4th, 1989" Is that political?

"Russia" Is that political?

"Q" Is that political?

yuppie_scum 4 years ago |

Just get offline

garyfirestorm 4 years ago |

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.

shove 4 years ago |

You're going to need a shovel and a beach.

jonnydubowsky 4 years ago |

https://github.com/bhunt6/HorseBlinders

idoh 4 years ago |

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.

formerkrogemp 4 years ago |

Have you tried a blindfold? Or sticking your head in the sand?

tonymet 4 years ago | |

you’re implying that news is informative but it’s at best soap opera and usually kayfabe .

Havoc 4 years ago |

You can’t really. Especially US politics.

Even on stuff like stock ticker boards there are always people that insist on bringing up Biden/Trump etc

shakezula 4 years ago |

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.

bathtiles 4 years ago | |

It sounds like you have opinions about OP's position?

For clarity, perhaps it's worth just stating those.