I started using Twitter (I’ll refer to it as Twitter because ‘X’ also means ‘unknown variable’ and that’s confusing for a lot of people) for news in 2020. I preferred it over Google News because it allowed better curation based on interest (Googles News algorithm ‘formula’ just seems archaic to me), and it had a decent socializing side, almost like Facebook. So it was a good balance. I get News from Namibia and South Africa because I have a lot of family in South Africa, and I lived there some time back. It seems like, over the years, my feed has grown more and more saturated with the most vile posts from ‘SAn Twitter’. I don’t know if the algorithm has changed (Selling negativity and fear) or whether I am just becoming old and bitter and becoming drawn into these posts. It’s like South Africans are always on the brink of civil ‘war’. 90% of my political feed from South Africa is ‘doomsday’ posts, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism and any other vile ism you can think off. My Namibian side is mostly civil discourse. You get the vile stuff, but it’s an anomaly to find pure hatred from ‘Namibia Twitter’. Am I alone here? Should I reset my algorithm? (which I’ve delayed because in this age of big data I don’t mind being cocooned a bit by my own interests). I’m keen to see whether this is just a thing of me being fed hatred by the algorithm because it’s ‘addictive’, or whether South African political discourse has become dangerously divisive.   submitted by   /u/Sad_Shoulder5682 [link]   [comments]