I find this to be a pretty important question when news organizations like Fox News are literally aiming to help the Republican Party to stay on power, CNN and MSNBC promote centrist candidates and media aggregators ranging from r/the_donald to r/chapotraphouse banning anyone who opposes them. Thing is, these are the most well known examples. How could we tell faulty media sources and aggregators apart from good ones in mass? Do you think that's possible?

In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me some really great personalized suggestions, but that came at the expense of me handing over significant amounts of personal data.

In prioritizing privacy, I feel like I've stepped away from a lot of the big recommendation engines because they're tied to data-hungry companies I am in the process of disengaging with (e.g. Goodreads is owned by Amazon). I can still find stuff I like, but it's often the result of manual searching that turns up popular recommendations that work for me, rather than less well-known or acutely relevant things. last.fm was good at giving me less "obvious" recommendations and would find music I was unlikely to find on my own. I want that, but for all of my media: books, movies, etc.

There's a second concern in that I also feel like I can't trust platforms like Netflix, who seem to prioritize their content over that of other studios. Their recommendations feel weighted in their favor, not mine.

What I want is an impartial recommendation engine that gives me high quality personalized suggestions without a huge privacy cost.¹ Is this a pipe dream, or are there examples of this kind of thing out there?

1. I don't mind handing over some of my specific interest data in order to get good recommendations for myself and help a site's algorithms cater to others, as I get that's how these things work. I just don't like the idea of my interests being even more data for a company that already has thousands of intimate data points on me.

I recently started jumping around various browsers and machines. I sometimes keep instinctually going to Google News in all of these environments. I am often signed-out in these other browsers. This has been an eye-opening experience for me.

Many years ago I had blocked Fox, RT, and other crap out of my GNews feed. I was living in a bubble of my own making. I actually prefer that bubble, as there is more factual information in it, but it comes at a cost. I had lost a lot of my situational awareness of the political and media climate.

I am not trying to be centrist here, I just think that one should know the entire battlefield, not just the news given from their comfortable sources. For one thing, I had no idea of the dominance which Fox News had in Google News, also that RT was so prevalent, also that there was so many other sources of utter right-wing propaganda that had been normalized. How can I fight disinformation if I am unaware of its origins?

What do you think about this? Would you take me up on my challenge of reading the uncustomised news? Do you ever try to get out of your comfort zone in the news? Does it help inform you?

_{edit: Just FYI, to easily use Google News, or any other news site signed-out, first open a "private window" in your browser.}