> If I scroll through Facebook or X/Twitter, it's miles of ragebait. There's good stuff in there too, but why the hell is it showing me posts from Angry Conservative Mom and Being Liberal and other stuff like that? I don't want to see it, but either I engage before I can stop myself, or they at least think I will.

You see it because you don't take the time to curate the content that it feeds you.

I don't use Facebook anymore because what I primarily used it for is better served by WhatsApp groups, but even so it is still incredibly easy to curate your feed and get rid of content you don't want to see.

The same is true of YouTube, X/Twitter and pretty much every other social media site.

E.g. on Facebook you click the ... next to the post in question and you can either choose 'hide' (typically if it's ad) to never see it again or 'not interested'.

In YouTube you do the same by clicking on the 3-dots and saying you're not interested in the content, or you subscribe to the channels you want to see and instead of having youtube.com as your bookmark/homepage you have youtube.com/feed/subscriptions as your bookmark.

It takes a smidge of work and it's not a 'one and done' process because they still recommend random new things all the time based on the things you engage with/the things they promote for whatever demographic subset(s) they've pinned you as but once you've got your feeds curated they become much fewer and farther between.

And honestly...sometimes the algorithm does surface something i'm interested in.

Finally just a word of warning with curation - you have to try find a balance if you want to avoid your entire online world becoming an echo chamber. In my eyes the curation isn't about trying to get rid of opinions you 'disagree' with, it's about trying to get rid of low quality content that serves the most reactionary/click-baity of content

Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy