Technological Walls


I have been reflecting on many of the topics in class recently: health concerns, sex and the media, family and the media, and advertising. I wanted to apply what I have been learning by setting up some "technological walls" (I need a better term for that). I wanted to limit the types of ads I could see and the possibility that I would run into sexual images.

Have you ever been looking for memes on Instagram and then several of them use offensive language? Or an ad on YouTube which you know you didn't look up earlier? I have often accepted them as a fact of using the online world. But those are the exact scenarios that this week I have attempted to cut out.

I began by going into my Instagram settings. I have not looked too deeply at them before today. It had many more features than I expected. You can control much of what you see! Here are the settings I changed:
  • In content preferences I:
    • Enabled show less sensitive content
    • Added a filter to filter out posts with certain explicit words.
    • Added fact-checking filters
  • In Meta Accounts Center I was able to:
    • Add ad preferences. I asked it to show less of about 10 different topics which might show me suggestive material
I then went into my YouTube settings. I turned on restricted mode. Then I went into Privacy and found the Ad settings. There were less options than in Instagram, but I removed some ad topics and increased the frequency of others.

No filter is perfect. Nor do I expect to never see anything explicit again, but I feel better about the walls I have put up. I figure I don't have to leave a sign out "All are Welcome". Because not all ads or posts are welcome in my head. 

If anyone has felt like me before, maybe try out what I did! I feel much better about this now. 

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