In olde internet times, we would talk about the quality of the information we’d encounter by referring to the good stuff as “signal” and all the other crap as “noise”. So a high signal-to-noise ratio mean that the group or community was enjoyable and useful. If the ratio was low, then that meant it was mostly people cluttering up a space and not contributing anything good. Believe it or not, back in olde times most of us actually cared about adding only good, quality information to the places we congregated.
Today, however, even before current political events, the whole of the internet is full of noise. Oh, you can still find good stuff if you hunt for it, but often it gets drowned out by the crap. And often the crap just makes us all feel… crappy.
Most of our noise tends to show up on social media, where we put up with links and posts by friends who we care about, even if we don’t really care about the topic they’re discussing. So today, to make your life more serene, some filtering tools for social media.
Facebook Purity is a plugin for the desktop that allows users to filter pretty much every single thing that shows up on a Facebook page, from all the stuff in the sidebars to certain types of posts. If you really don’t want to know that your Uncle Bob liked that post about the white supremacist, well you can filter that. Facebook Purity also offers a text-based filter, which means that all you have to do is add “Trump” to that box and any post that mentions the US president by name will not show up in your feed. Some stuff might still get through – it does not work on shared posts or posts where someone refers to him as “that asshole” instead of by your filtering term, but it does a great job of clearing out the majority of stuff you don’t want to see. Sadly this plug-in only works on desktops, and not on mobile devices. For my own sanity, I’ve deleted Facebook from my phone, but I totally get how that can be the hardest thing ever to actually do.
For Twitter, I am a huge fan of the app Twitteriffic. This one is mobile only, and not desktop, but it also allows users to “muffle” tweets based on user name, hashtag or text. Muffled tweets show up in your feed with minimal info, typically user plus the topic/user/hashtag you’ve muffled, which allows you to open that post or ignore it.
Don’t forget that muting on Twitter or unfollowing on Facebook are also great ways to take a break from someone without removing them completely, or without them knowing that you just can’t deal with their shit at the moment.
Do not feel obligated to read all the stuff in your social media feeds, especially if it stresses you out. You are absolutely allowed to filter, cull or even take a complete break if you feel the need.
And finally, please consider using good Netiquette – if you are writing or sharing posts on social media about things like Trump, make sure you’re using common keywords (“Donald Trump” instead of “Lord Dampnuts” for instance…) or hashtags to make it easier for others to filter out those posts if they don’t want to see them, while still being able to read the other, non-triggering stuff that you’re posting.