If you're like me, you have your news mixed in with the personal happenings of your friends on Facebook. It all began innocently enough. I'd see a news post deposited into my news feed by a friend, found it interesting, clicked the link, and read the article. While on the outlet's page, it asked me to "like" their page to begin receiving content similar to what I just read. "Sure," I thought. Why not?
And before I knew it, I was receiving more news updates in my Facebook news feed than I was alerts about what my friends and family were up to. For a short while, It was quite nice to get short stories and reports centered around issues that I cared about, particularly civil rights for the LGBT community and the ongoing fight for marriage equality. But then it ballooned into articles focused on sensible gun control measure, environmental issues, states' adoption of the controversial stand your ground laws, etc. etc.
Now, I'm not saying that all of these topics are not near and dear to my precious, liberal heart, but where did the fun in Facebook go? I had let this plethora of tiny news outlets drop their little bombs of information into my news feed and make it much more difficult to communicate with my friends and family. And of course, these outlets being highly politicized, never failed to trumpet the latest musings from those on the far, far right, which frequently proved to be irritating to downright rage inducing.
So for now, I've made a promise to myself. I will delete almost but not all of these outlets from my news feed. I have many other reliable sources of journalism to which I can turn to remain informed.....and hopefully regain a small measure of peace from the drumbeat of political polarization.
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