Earlier this year, America elected its newest president, Donald Trump. I'm a Canadian, and thus I'm not into U.S. politics, but I have several friends who are. They introduced me to several popular Facebook pages such as God Emperor Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos, and I must say that their memes and news content can be superior. However, a week ago I couldn't stand it anymore and eliminated ALL Facebook pages that dealt in news of any sort, and in this MyTake I'll explain the reasons why I essentially was forced to make such a drastic move.
"Fake News"
I once encountered a post, I believe from God Emperor Trump, where the admin put up a series of seemingly contradictory series of CNN news articles. Upon further inspection, TWO of them turned out to be opinion pieces and only the other was touted as factual news. This reveals a rather irritating problem of how nobody wants to fact check news articles and related material. And who can blame them? Nobody wants to do an academic assessment of their news, they just want to ingest itas efficiently as possible.
Anyone figure out whether Russia hacked the election or not yet? I ask you, why is it so hard to determine facts yet so easy to spout your opinion everywhere without restraint?
Bias
I really don't understand what the deal is with large media corporations and how they treat the president. If the public elected Trump, wouldn't they just want to see pro-Trump news? The opposite is also true in alt-right news sources as well: Milo News tends to snipe at stories the mainstream media ignores, or that may not be "politically correct" to display (political correctness is a whole other story to discuss...)
In the end, I don't really expect a news outlet without bias, since we're all only human, but it still upsets me to think about how people are just fed all this biased information while some of them still have the gall to declare themselves open-minded.
The biggest complaint: A Business of Hate
I shouldn't need a picture for this. When's the last time you saw a happy news story? My bet is that perhaps you saw one recently, but it was absolutely DROWNED in the anger-inducing headlines of many other pieces of news. The sad fact about anger and fear is that it sells better than love or comradery. We're more likely to click on an outrageous or triggering link than a happy or ordinary seeming one. That's the way we're wired I suppose.
What happened to me is that all these hateful stories and messages FROM BOTH SIDES eventually made me feel sick. The instant I deleted my Facebook pages I felt much better about the state of the world, because all the evil elements of humanity (if you subscribe to such morality) were constantly being brought to the surface in my Facebook feed, and thus were what I would inevitably settle my mind on.
Bottom line (tl;dr) is that much of today's media may be false, is almost certainly biased, and is engineered to get your attention by poking at your negative emotions. Switch most of it off, and you'll be glad you did.
Alternatively I'm open to hearing suggestions about decent media outlets that avoid the problems I mentioned.
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OK, you listed your two right wing sources, God Emperor Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos, so what were the ones providing all the "hateful stories and messages" from the other side?
Let's pick three of my favorites: CNN, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed. I'm not sure if Buzzfeed counts as a "reputable" news source, but I've definitely seen some terrible stuff there.
I don't follow any of those, but at least CNN is corporatist but mainstream and sane, isn't it?
Also, Huffington Post doesn't seem that hateful, to me, but that's the website, not facebook (which I don't use).
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