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Comment by bhaavan | Hacker News Reader

Political ads are explicitly marked, and can be turned off. On the other hand, to classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial. More so, there is no clear universal definition of this. One man's politics is other man's "important announcement". With such ambiguous definitions it is hard to train a ML model for this purpose explicitly.

On the other hand, if you downvote and dismiss political posts regularly, the ML model can pick up signals and remove such content from your feed. This is feasible as it allows the algorithm to make mistakes and a room to learn. But this isn't an explicit remove all political posts and political posts only.

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Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like:

"Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status."

Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.

Just because something has a slightly vague definition and can touch upon most things in life doesn't mean its definition must be stretched to encompass literally everything.

You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...

And you would be correct. Apolitical media doesn't and can't exist. The existence of media is a political statement.

You can restrict partisan media, or identity politics media, or other subsets of politics. But politics as a whole is implicit in every action that involves the public.

You can say that about life

It is an exceptionally privileged situation to be in when you believe you can simply opt out of politics.

Everyone's life is affected by politics, but I'd contest that it's entirely possible to opt out of participating in the political process. Many people simply don't have the time in their life to take part.

I have a friend who works two jobs and has two kids, when they get home they make dinner, do homeworks and go to bed. For them politics is something abstract on the TV news.

It's much like art, where ever you go there's some form of art. But you don't need to lift a pencil and do art or even talk about it.

But you, largely, can! We're privileged not because of any actual individual privilege (though it does help quite a bit!) but because there are already a bunch of people who are fighting for your interests. You only really have to participate in a tiny tiny subset of issues where your position isn't being heard.

Although I do not disagree with that definition I think it is valuable to make a distinction between government politics and "every day" politics.

> classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial.

There's probably a set of 50 or so keyword combinations, plus the names of current and former politicians and common misspellings, that would cover 90% of cases.

- He was playing poker, with a pair on the table, but his trump card was an ace.

- I refuse to pay this "Bill".

- That looks like an Obama suit.

Are these political statements? It's naive to make such a claim that a whitelist of word is sufficient. The "facebook is censoring me" gang will eat you up in a jiffy.

Even extremely complex models will fail this test.

List A: support, vote, protest, defend, military, troops, economy, country, taxes, rights, government, children, child, responsibility, leader

List B: obama, pelosi, clinton, trump, pence, mitch, reagan, bush, maga, antifa, president, congress, representative, democrat, republican

If a comment has a word from list A and list B, it's political.

Using this simple scheme on Facebook would be something I would do if possible.

If that's the route we want to take, I think a browser extension would work just fine. Loop over all divs that represent tweets, if contains any key words, delete div. Rise and repeat with other websites.

I wonder if a general black list exists for various websites already.

Won't work on iPhones.

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