Why Traditional News Platforms Don’t Filter Out Unwanted Content
At first, I tried to simply tune my existing social media and news apps to show less of the annoying stuff. I adjusted preferences, unfollowed certain pages, even tried using the “mute” or “hide” functions on Facebook and Twitter. But it felt like a game of whack-a-mole – block one toxic topic, and another pops up. The truth is, traditional platforms fall short when it comes to filtering out specific content like politics or disturbing news. Here’s why:
Algorithms Drive Your Feed: On most platforms, powerful algorithms decide what appears in your news feed, prioritizing whatever will keep you engaged the longest. Unfortunately, that often means sensational, emotionally-charged content rises to the top. (As the saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.”) Studies show that news headlines with negative words get more clicks – especially for political and economic stories Content that provokes strong emotions like anger or fear tends to get shared more(1). In other words, outrage drives the algorithm. Facebook’s own leaked research revealed that its algorithm sometimes “amplifies and rewards hateful, divisive, misleading content” because those posts attract eyeballs and ad revenue (2). The result: your feed keeps showing you the very political drama or upsetting news you want to avoid, because that’s what the algorithm has learned grabs attention.
Limited User Control: You might wonder, why not just give users a simple switch to turn off political content or other triggers? The major social networks have been notoriously reluctant to hand over that control. Facebook, for example, has been pressured to let users disable the News Feed algorithm entirely and just see posts chronologically. But the company has resisted, convinced that its software knows what you “should” see better than you do. In Facebook’s view, their personalization AI is superior – a paternalistic stance that critics say ignores users’ right to shape their own experience (3). While some platforms have introduced partial fixes (Instagram recently started limiting “political content” from accounts you don’t follow by default (4), these measures are one-size-fits-all and often vague. You’re rarely given a detailed menu to say “show me less of this specific topic.” At best, you can try to train the algorithm by clicking “Not interested” on certain posts, but it’s an imperfect guesswork game.
Engagement Over Well-Being: The fundamental issue is that the goals of traditional news feeds don’t align with your mental well-being. Their goal is to maximize engagement, time-on-site, and ad clicks – not to minimize your stress. Outrage and controversy simply perform too well in terms of engagement. As one analysis put it, media companies (and their algorithms) often “give customers what they want” – which unfortunately can mean an endless stream of negative headlines. This is why even after you mute a few terms, the platform might start showing adjacent content or new trending crises. It keeps hooking you back in. In fact, more than 50% of Americans now get their news via social media platforms, where clickbait and recommendation algorithms are engineered to keep us scrolling (5). Breaking that cycle isn’t easy when the system is built to exploit our attention.
Lack of Fine-Grained Filters: Consider your Facebook or Twitter settings. Can you tick a box to “remove triggering content” like violence or to “filter political news” entirely out of your timeline? Not really. These platforms allow some broad content preferences and letting you follow or unfollow sources, but they don’t offer a true customize-my-news-feed button. You can’t upload a list of keywords that personally upset you and have the algorithm universally filter them out. At best, Twitter (now X) introduced a “mute words” feature, but it’s clunky and easy to bypass (and many people don’t even know it exists). The result is that users remain largely at the mercy of what the platform decides to show. It’s telling that 62% of Americans believe social media companies have too much control over the mix of news people see, and a majority say this results in a worse news experience for the public (6). People want more agency, but the platforms haven’t fully delivered it.
I personally hit this wall: I found that no mainstream news app or social feed truly let me filter out the negativity to the extent I needed. Sure, I could unsubscribe from a particularly toxic politics subreddit or avoid cable news, but online that’s hard when everything is interwoven. Viral stories seep through every crack. At one point I remember thinking, “I wish I could just hit a button and remove all political content from my feeds for a while.” That simple wish – to opt-out of the outrage cycle – felt impossible on the existing platforms. And that’s a problem.