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Shooting in B'more

Nothing shows up in any of my feeds now. 28 f'n people shot. It has a lot more to do with who and where than what happened. You can bet you ass of this was a mall or church in suburbia it would be all over the place. If you don't believe racism exists today, this is a prime example.
A mall, church, or school gets more attention because any of us could’ve been victims. Late night in a murderous city like Baltimore won’t happen to most of us. Not out that late and not at a block party in a dangerous city.
 
Luckily, my “newsfeed” consists of:

Hunttalk, Fresh Tracks Tv, Meateater; various wildlife agencies and conservation organizations, land management agencies, DayZ, and a healthy dose of funny fail , funny animal videos and reaction videos on YouTube.

I decided a few years ago, for better or worse, that ignorance is bliss when it comes to current events and politics not involving conservation, wildlife management, land management, etc.

I have been much happier since I shut off the 24 hour “news” stream.
 
First I have heard about it even today.

Just checked the news feed thing on my phone and it has a shooting in Philly, which isn’t shocking, and the rest is red, white, and blue bikini pictures for some reason. Maybe because I was at the beach??

I don’t really pay attention to the news app
 
That curation of what one sees online is a great reason for everyone to use a good VPN and any other privacy measures you can find whilst browsing around.

And, FWIW, the Guardian is pretty far to the left and has July 4 shootings as the lead story:
1688525011443.png
 
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“The social dillema” on Netflix does a good job explaining what Randy described. It was very eye opening to why we have such a divided country. Their metric of success is how many minutes they can grab your attention and they know if they give you want you want you’ll stay longer. We all end up living in a echo chamber reading “myopinion.com”
 
The SC school shooter and now the Philly block shooter are adding unfortunate body counts to a murderer demographic not typically pulling the trigger in past massacres. Life is fragile.
 
To the point of your IP address, email account, username, etc, being little more than a tool used by systematic processes to build a profile to maximize the goals of that which you are seeing, there's not much to be done. I suppose you could live in the world of VPNs, but that really won't even save you.

The stories of the online world are built into a form made to fit the puzzle piece of your preferences and preconceptions

It's not a perfect method for news acquisition, and to be sure you miss some things, but I basically get my initial news from A) The local small town newspaper (Boulder Monitor) and B) social media. Before one thinks that social media is a poor medium for news acquisition, I'll be more specific. I follow individuals, and they are who gives me my news. Now, even if one found the perfect balance of reliability and spin amongst a pile of people/contingents on social media to follow, you'll still be dealing with the signal boosting, throttling, self-censorship, or even outright naked censorship that certain companies engage in, but I think if you can find a good pile of people/things to follow, and you are careful, you will get a far deeper, more balanced, and more nuanced version of The News than any historic media company will give you. I don't have TV, and I haven't been to cnn, foxnews, msnbc, npr, etc, .coms in years, and I haven't missed anything meaningful.

Knowing what the contingents you follow are, their spins, their biased perspectives, is important, but how is that any different from people you meet in real life? Over time, you can really get "a feel" for the sincerity of different independent sources - genuinely attempting to tell what they believe the truth to be being an attribute more potent than nearly anything else. The fact is, the "mainstream" news orgs are just awful and manipulated in all sorts of directions, and the last 5 years offers mountains of evidence to that being true as hell.

For an example of news orgs that I follow, I'll throw out Breaking Points, which in its daily show offers the competing "conservative" and "liberal" viewpoints of individual issues, as well as more importantly the even larger pile of issues where neither of those perspectives should affect how the public feels, to be a news "org" I keep coming back to.
 
Has anybody’s news feed told them they found cocaine in the Whitehouse? That’s an interesting one. I’m sure it’s leftovers from Trump.
Saw that this morning a fair bit down my feed. This got top billing today apparently. Didn't see anything about shootings in the 4th.

Screenshot_20230705_083856_Google News.jpg
 
I'm too random for an algorithm to figure me out. I heard it on the radio.

Either way, I feel bad for the victims, and we have a serious mental health crisis in America.
 
PEAX Trekking Poles

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