How to Hack the News
Imagine getting all your news, music, podcasts, videos, new releases, feeds from any website, posts from Twitter, Tiktok, Mastodon, Youtube and more all in a single app. Imagine having your subscriptions, notes, and viewing history synchronized to all your devices and apps. Imagine if you could get all of it with:
- no advertising
- no algorithmic censorship
- no account logon to corp/gov servers (anonymous)
- no installation of spyware on your devices.
Well you can!
Here is a great video explaining much of this.
Why You Would Want to Read This
Some say ignorance is bliss, but ignorant people are usually unhealthy, poor, and bad citizens. Some say what you don't know won't hurt you, but what you don't know can kill you.
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past." -George Orwell
"He who controls the news controls the world." -Caitlin Johnstone
We rely on digital media for our understanding of the world beyond our immediate surroundings. Democracy dies in darkness. Maintaining and increasing wealth and health relies on being well informed. Sometimes we like some entertainment such as music, games, and video too.
Everything in the media is biased except the stock quotes and sports scores. Getting a broad perspective from multiple different sources is the best way to understand issues. Efficiently getting a wide range of news without being manipulated can be difficult.
This guide will help you to get a lot of information efficiently. If you want recommendations of sources of information, ask me. I am happy to help and share.
Typical Methods of Getting Media
News Sites
Most media organizations have a web page with many links to articles they publish.
Problems:
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One cannot be expected to open up every web page every day to peruse and consume the content. It takes too much time.
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Most of these web sites are full of hostile surveillance advertising and dark patterns.
News Aggregator Apps
Apps such as Apple News, Google News, MSN News, Feedly.. will gather stories from sources you choose onto a single feed.
Problems
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The sources available are often limited to mainstream corporate or government sources.
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These companies track what you read and what you follow to push advertising(manipulation) to you either in the app or elsewhere.
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These companies can manipulate your feeds and censor content or creators.
Corporate/Government Controlled Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube.. have been a great way to publish, share, and discuss issues.
Problems
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These platforms try to record pretty much everything you do to help them serve advertising(manipulation) and build a dossier on you.
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They share this information about you with nefarious agencies such as data brokers and governments.
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Censorship through algorithmic manipulation is rising. Content their advertisers or the government do not want seen will simply not appear in your feeds.
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Dark patterns are deployed to drive engagement and addiction.
The Game Changers: RSS and Free Social Media
RSS: Really Simple Syndication
RSS has been around for decades, but you may not have heard much about it because corporations and governments want to herd you into the above mentioned places. Like many free as in freedom methods and tools, no money is spent promoting it.
Most news sources have an RSS feed which you can put into an RSS feed reader to get unmanipulated unmonitored feeds that are generally free of advertising. You can get the mainstream corporate and government sources but also get independent press, Twitter posts, Youtube channels, podcasts, blogs, and more all in a single feed.
You can use any RSS reader client(app you install on your device), but if it is only on your device, it will not be synchronized to your other devices and you loose it if your device is lost or breaks. I use FreshRSS to synchronize apps on my PC and handset. Whether I read from https://ravergram.club/RSS, RSS Guard on my PC, or FreshRSS app on my handset, what I read, star, and organize is synchronized. It is on Ravergram which is safely away from any corporate or government view.
By getting your feed from this server rather than direct from sources to your device, you also obscure your IP address from the source. In other words, a source such as Youtube only sees feed traffic coming to my server and not to your house. If you open links in the feeds, then that traffic is directly connected to you unless you use TOR, I2P, or VPN.
Problems
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One needs to find the RSS feed for each source, but you can watch the video below for some tips.
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Some sources might post too frequently, but you can use 'Feed Reducer' in https://ravergram.club/rss-bridge/.
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Some feeds provide little information in the feed and require opening the site for meaningful content. See browser add ons below.
Step by Step Demonstration
The steps demonstrated in below videos are:
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Find the RSS feed you want from searching or appending /RSS or /Feed to a site URL.
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Generate feeds from other sources using RSS Bridge.
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Copy and paste that RSS feed into FreshRSS or any RSS client you have synchronized with FreshRSS.
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Create folders and organize your feeds.
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Safely navigate to linked articles without advertising and paywalls.
📽️ Here are two videos: One showing setup on a big screen and one on a small screen.
I mentioned mobile app for Youtube https://newpipe.net/
Useful Browser add ons in Firefox
Ublock Origin blocks surveillance advertising in both directions: Here is a guide on how to best use it. And a more advanced one is here.
Bypass Paywalls If extension is not available for your browser, add https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt to Ublock Origin filters. If you are unable to install extensions on your browser, you can use https://12ft.io/.
Libredirect routes you to safe versions of popular sites.
Other RSS directories and tools
Youtube without ads and tracking
If you created an account on https://invid.peoplever.se/, you can manage your subscriptions there and create a single RSS feed for all of your subscriptions.
Twitter without ads and tracking
Convert any email newsletters into RSS feeds
If you have any difficulty finding a feed for a source you want, chat me up on Talk. I am happy to help you find it.
Want a quick start? You can upload this sample OPML file of subscriptions to have a bunch of feeds. Remove everything you don't want and add more.
How do you discover great independent sources to add to your feed, and how do you share great articles you find?
Free Social Media
Social media is needed when you want to share and discuss articles or propaganda. The fediverse is a world of social media generally free of surveillance, advertising, and censorship as it is not controlled by any corporation or government. Your feeds of people you follow is simply chronological without any manipulation other than the filters and hashtags you configure. It is composed of thousands of server instances around the world using free software that all talk to each other. This makes it impervious to any central control and resistant to censorship. Each instance has moderators to ensure people follow the rules of its instance, but this is very different from corporate and government censorship. People can easily move their accounts from one instance to another whenever they want.
See the guide for social media
Final Notes and Advice
For ethical and other reasons, I do not to participate in corporate/government media, but everybody needs to choose their own path. If people start using and investing some time on free social media, it will grow faster. The first step is creating your account and sharing it with people who might want to follow you. You can use both corporate and free media simultaneously.
I have shown how to evade most surveillance advertising in news media. Unfortunately most of our media is funded this way and creates a corrupted system where the advertisers/corporations influence what we get. Independent media (not corporate or government influenced) sometimes uses advertising but mainly relies on us to fund them. When you find a good news outlet or creator, fund them or support them as directly as possible to reward them and keep them independent.