How to unsubscribe from social-media toxicity
In late 2020, when the world was completely engulfed in pandemic and political turmoil, there was a sense of distress and unrest in everybody’s mind. As the doors to outside world were getting shut, the doors to the entire world via the free internet were getting wider and wider. Most people, like me were trying to keep up with the world, various trends, events via the avenue of social networking platforms.
In an attempt of keeping up with the ongoings of the world, I gradually got subscribed to a lot of pages on various social networking platforms. I was getting the news, opinions and comments from so many different places. Initially I thought this is great and I am able to get all the information automatically and instantly.
Eventually I found myself reacting to these news articles, blogs and events. To me, the alarm was when I started commenting on other people’s comment, whom I didn’t even know and had nothing to do with. This was the time when I realized that I have fallen into the trap and I am contributing to the overall mess. I realized this was the time I need to take some action to change my subconscious behavior. As a person working with data regularly, I need to make my decisions, rationales based on data and not mere ~160 char headline or tweet or comment.
I observed that many news agencies are also in a trap as most of them are running in the race of being the FIRST at publishing the news. Growing up, my parents used to tell me to read news article as a way to update my knowledge and as a way to improve my language skills. However, while reading today’s online news, I often see misrepresentation of facts, typing errors, spelling mistakes. This makes me wonder if it is even worth reading the news, which the news writer and editor themselves didn’t even researched and proofread??
Slowly I started feeling that I am also spending a lot of time on these activities. I started analyzing the time I was spending on these platforms. There are lots of ways of doing this type of analysis, for starters, there is a screen time dashboard in android (under settings -> apps & notifications) which gives application wise distribution and there is a similar dashboard on mac as well called screen time.
In this analysis I found that I am spending way more time on these apps (and on these activities) than I would like. I was clearly wasting a lot of time and additionally, while doing so, I was also deteriorating my thinking process. The obvious action for me was to deactivate and get out of these social media platforms for good.
However, I thought, is the problem the social networking website or the problem with the content I am reading. I started wondering if there is a way to use these recommendation engines for my own good. I thought, the recommendation engines recommend me content based on the way I respond to these articles and system’s recommendations.
The experiment
As an attempt to resolve these issues, I decided to start an experiment with my usage and took following steps:
- Unsubscribed to all the channels, pages, that were publishing news or related posts
- Unfollowed all the people who were re-posting the news articles or reacting to the news articles
- Turned off notifications for majority of pages, publications, apps, people etc. I figured, the only thing I want to get notified for is when I get a message from my family, friends and colleagues. I did keep the birthday notifications, because it always feels good when someone wishes you a happy birthday ;) .
- There was a ton of content from pages that I was not even following on my walls (based on recommendations). I started marking them with “hide”, “don’t show video like this” etc.
- I consciously stopped responding / reacting to any post, recommendation that was remotely related to such toxicity. This also includes not even stopping on any such posts while scrolling.
Positive Reinforcement
After the unsubscribing spree, I thought, what are the things that I actually want to see. I thought, there has to be articles, pages that spread knowledge about science, latest research etc. I started “liking” and subscribing to those pages. One of the first page I subscribed to was the StartTalk. To add a bit of relaxation to the mix, I liked a few pages on the topics I like, for example, Panda and the Dodo and the shows I like, like Friends ,The Big Bang theory, Sherlock Holmes, etc. This would help recommendation engine to figure out what to recommend.
After this, I started getting recommendations on the content related to the above topics. I still sometimes randomly get recommendation on “toxicity”, but I continue to make a point to “scroll” past that as soon as I can and consciously not respond in any way to any of it.
Conclusion
I have been following this approach since about half a year now. I now get much less (almost none) toxic content on my social networking accounts than I used to and I don’t feel distress anymore. The recommendation engine(s) now recommends me more productive content, for example, it recommended me videos from channel “Veritasium” (its a channel about science and engineering), which I find quite informative.
There are times, when I do not get know about latest news (or so called “breaking” news), but whenever I want to see the news, I open up articles in incognito or private windows. This is to sneak away from recommendation engines detecting my interests in news.
This approach is no way scientifically tested and the sample size is just 1. But I think this could be a way out of the toxicity!
Do you have any other ideas to avoid the grasp of toxic recommendations? Please share your ideas in the comments!
