“Elon has presented X to be the new face of news – which is wild to me. There is a level of journalistic responsibility that does exist that you can’t apply to 50,000 people posting on X for various reasons; money, clout, fame, hate, bias.”
The above statement comes not from a news veteran with an inherent dislike for social media, but from Mike Majlak – a co-host of Impaulsive with Logan Paul, one of the world’s most successful podcasts. If you’re new to that platform, it’s not without its controversies, and some of that statement could easily apply to its creators. In short, it felt a very unlikely place to find someone sticking up for journalists.
But it’s not necessarily the most uplifting time to consume news. In 2017, 24% of people said that they actively avoid the news. That’s 46% in 2024 and it’s not a leap in imagination to suggest that might be because of what has ultimately been one bad news story after another. But stronger political views, in either direction, has also left people feeling unrepresented.
Journalists have worked to do – and to some extent they are doing – to counteract news avoidance. Some of the answer involves existing where the audience is – something the industry has been historically slow with. But people are ultimately responsible for what they consume.
So today, I give some simple pieces of advice you can take to clean up your news consumption, to hopefully make your phone a happier place – rather than one associated with phrases like ‘doom-scrolling’ – but also a useful one.
1. Download the app
News websites, BBC notwithstanding, have adverts. A lot of the time they can be intrusive and make reading a challenging experience. Dedicated apps often circumvent the worst of these issues, but they also present a much-wider range of topics and give you a broader news diet that lets you pick out what you’re interested in.
To give a basic personal example, every week I read and enjoy a particular food reviewer on a particular news app. I’m interested in food – and there’s a lot of food content to take in when I make my way to that section of the app. I have never been served any of that content via social media.
2. Be sensible with the algorithms
In painfully basic terms; social media algorithms serve you what they think you’re interested in, and especially posts that have successfully engaged people around topics you’ve engaged with previously.
And the way that some creators and accounts engage with that algorithm to serve you content could be seen as irresponsible. Posts around health, fitness and body-image can be particularly problematic.
Instead, think about finding the accounts you value, and that either help you feel good or you engage with productively, and go to them directly.
And if you want to clean up your recommended content areas on any platform, spend more time engaging with people and views you agree with – not just those you take issue with. You’ll still get plenty to challenge your worldview, but the balance will be easier to digest.
3. Don’t switch off entirely
Facebook can be a disheartening place but it’s done a lot of good, too. Community groups on Facebook genuinely helped a lot of people through the pandemic and, when disaster strikes, that sort of behaviour is still replicated.
What you get served can sometimes make it easy to forget – but there are parts of the internet that are still genuinely brilliant. Platforms have struggled to replicate what Facebook has done in a local sense – but places like Discord servers or YouTube channels have allowed like-minded people to come together and build communities around worldwide topics.
4. More time actively consuming news in habitual ways
The aspect of consuming news that affects my mood in the most negative way is when I do so passively. Scrolling through my phone not looking for anything in particular, or flicking the news on the TV to kill 30 mins before I do my Sunday chores, for example.
Instead, think about signing up to a newsletter you know comes at a regular time and use that space to read, watch or listen to topics that interest you in a way that suits you best, from people you actively trust.
5. Take out a paid-for news subscription
The more free news that there is, the better. But nothing will encourage you to devour news to its full extent, and so get the full context, like spending some money on it.
This means news publishers can spend more time creating for people like you, which invariably leads to higher quality.
This doesn’t need to be a news provider in the traditional sense. I have a paid subscription to a video game channel on YouTube that I believe to be the best at what they do.
In this and the news subscription I have, I spent a long time telling myself “I’ll pay for this one day” before eventually making the step. If that’s you, now is a good time.
6. Don’t believe that echo chambers are a bad thing
For years, the regular criticism of some platforms was that they have become an echo chamber. The idea being that the same view is shared repeatedly until it becomes fact but actually isn’t representative of the real world.
That was, ironically given what X is in 2025, an accusation once levelled at Twitter, which tended at the time to be much more progressive than the general public in a wider sense.
But actually, while we shouldn’t shut ourselves off from views that we don’t share, it’s okay to spend time in places with like-minded people. If that’s Bluesky, where views probably sit some way to the left of the general public, that’s fine.
Alma 