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Show HN: I removed politics from Twitter with AI (mindfw.com)

40 points by Navkun ↗ HN
I'm sure you all saw the debate a few days ago, alongside all the tech influencoors giving their mid-takes about politics.

Doesn't it get tiring?

That's why I built mindfirewall a chrome extension that uses AI to filter out tweets.

You'll never have to see politics, war, or negativity on your timeline again.

In the future you'll be shocked you even allowed this stuff into your brain in the first place.

Let me know what you think below, does it feel too much like censorship? would you use this?

100 comments

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[dead] judiisis
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croes
Define woke
vkou
I define it as anything that makes me uncomfortable.
krapp
Most people do nowadays and that's honestly weird.

It seems like anti-wokeness has turned into a legitimate phobic disorder for a lot of people. The more abstract the common definition of "woke" becomes, the more all-pervasive "wokeness" appears to be, the more effort the anti-woke put in to avoiding it like germophobes, the tighter the purity spiral wraps around their lives.

It's actually fun to watch these people become a parody of everything they hate.

[dead] julienreszka
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torlok
Until you look at places like Florida, where "anti-woke" people ban sex-ed books, and drag shows.
croes
Meritocracy is a myth.

The pandemic showed that or just look who are the richest people in the world.

torlok
It's whatever Rogan, Musk, Peterson, and other sheltered conservatives don't like.
melon_tusk
I would love to have a feature like that.
a9dhalaan
technically, you can add the tag "woke" and hope that Gpt-4o mini's definition of woke is the same as yours. Doubtful it will give you the results you're after, but maybe to a small extent.
croes
Echo chamber 2.0
Navkun
Honestly, doesn't really feel like an echo-chamber. I just block out all news/politics so I don't get funnelled into one way of thinking. My feeds mostly just tech (without the tech-politics guys thankfully).
smegger001
less echo chamber than it is a sound proof room
eaglelizard
There's no way I'm adding this extension. The website doesn't include information on how "AI" is used or how user data is handled. I'd expect a lot more transparency for an app that presumably requires full access to a user's socials.
Navkun
Thank you, I will add more clarity on the website now. We use OpenAI's mini model, so your data goes to them (and OpenAI doesn't store data from API req's) and the only things we store are your settings.

Also, we don't require access to any of your socials, we process the tweets directly in your viewport as you would have seen them.

For example we work on reddit and youtube as well and it works without logging in.

But thanks for the feedback!

a9dhalaan
"we process the tweets directly in your viewport as you would have seen them."

The primary issue with this approach is, even with the speed of gpt-4o mini, often times you're going to be displaying the "harmful" content for enough time for the brain to process it. This is especially true when you're dealing with images and short 1 sentence content like twitter. I think you'll want a safety mode, where nothing is displayed/or you have a css-blur on it, until it has been vetted.

Navkun
Forgot to mention we actually process ahead of the viewport as well so other than the first load it's highly unlikely you will see an unfiltered tweet (from personal experience of using it). But thanks for the idea at the end I think I'll add that!
theaussiestew
Just what I've been looking for. Will you support filtering images too? And any chance of this being open source?
Navkun
Image filtering is one of our next priorities since many harmful tweets have no text but include an image.

In terms of open source, I'm 20 and in uni so honestly want to make some money from this and be able to continue to improve it - not sure how I could do that with open source.

jart
Wow I've wanted something like this for a very long time. Where's the source code? As much as I loathe politics, putting Raymond Hill level trust in a stranger is something that has to be earned. AI is already black box enough as it is. But to not even have the JavaScript be open source, and a slick looking website, makes me think this project has some kind of monetizable intent. Does this thing even run locally?
Navkun
I'm 20 an in uni so yes I plan to monetize this so I can stop eating ramen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner :)

jokes aside, I understand some users are wary of their data. We don't require any access to your socials since we just read the tweets directly on your viewport. The only data we store are your settings. Your requests go through OpenAI (and they don't store your data either).

For something fully local, I actually did build it where I used a local LLM model on the computer to do the same thing; how much would you pay for that?

jart
It says right on the Chrome page that your extension handles my PII and has access to the content of websites I visit. Isn't that basically unlimited power? How do you intend to monetize this? If there's no credit card required to install your extension, then this sounds like a great way for you to lose money. How are you covering your OpenAI API fees? I could easily see you paying $5/day for each Twitter addict. I'm sorry but this whole I'm an anonymous person living off Ramen in Brazil and I want full power over your browser to monetize you, do you really expect people to download that?
a9dhalaan
The free plan is extremely limited, just runs on one website and only blocks a 500 tweets/month. Also gpt-4o mini isn't that expensive to be $5/day/user, even with a lot of page views.
Navkun
Yeah I think I'll make the free plan better, thanks for mentioning that.
GavCo
I really like the concept. I think users are completely outmatched when it comes to social media. The big platforms have literally thousands of super smart people working to make their products sticky. All we have is our caveman brains that didn't evolve for this. I don't think regulation is the answer — we need smart tools like this that help us control how we use the platforms.

I tried out the extension now and it seems to work well. Great job on it!

I'd recommend changing the placeholder content for "Block Tags". "Enter a Keyword" made me think it would filter exact matches but it's actually filtering based on semantic meaning. Keyword also makes you think it needs to be a single word and not a phrase...

IMO the free tier is a bit too restrictive and doesn't give a good sense of the full value of the product (e.g. you'll lose someone who isn't on Twitter but wants to try it for Reddit). I'd suggest either opening the free tier up a bit, or moving to a trial rather than freemium model.

All in all, really well done! Hoping this is successful

Navkun
For sure, honestly I hated how much politics I was seeing on twitter and could feel it affect me and my work which got me to build mindfirewall in the first place.

Thanks for the feedback also!

I'll change the placeholder text for the next release to make it more clear.

For the free tier, I think a trial might work better as you've suggested so they can use the other platforms.

_Microft
Here's a solution that works purely locally and can be pasted right into the address bar. Make sure to update your Twitter bookmark as well:

about:blank

nerdright
I am loving this idea already. My Twitter timeline is a clusterfuck of political contents, which is exhausting. All I want is to indulge myself in entertaining posts and nothing more. I use Twitter as a way to relax and let my mind breathe. So this is wonderful to see!

Any plans to support Firebox on Android? I heavily use Twitter on my phone so would be sweet to install the extension on my phone.

dartharva
Twitter already has a built-in solutions to it, and has always had it. Just click on the 3-dot button on the kind of posts you don't want to see, and select "Not interested". And engage more with the kind of posts that you would like to have, and stop liking or reposting political stuff no matter how much you agree with it. The algorithms merely reflect your own patterns and preferences, if you find that exhausting it isn't the algorithm's fault.

My Twitter timeline is close to pristine, and on top of it Twitter has even started to promote posts from smaller accounts on the same topics so that I get even better exposure in things I like. It is awesome. You just need to have some hygiene.

Navkun
Honestly I use those features extensively and it never seems to work properly, there's always a few posts that I dislike and shouldn't have been on my feed (like politics, news etc...); which is why I built mindfirewall in the first place.
Navkun
Had the same thoughts which is why I built mindfirewall in the first place, glad to hear this is something you'd like.

Firefox is super easy to support from a chrome extension so will add that next (just didn't have the time yet).

If you want to use mindfirewall on your

Android: Download Kiwi browser

iphone: Download Orion browser

These should let you use mindfireall on your phone, although let me know if you run into any issues. My twitter is @ navigatoragi and my email is nav@mindfw.com

dojitza1
Amazing concept, if I may ask what are your usage costs for say 5 minutes of browsing for a single user on reddit?
Navkun
I use it daily for a few hours and that costs us about $0.1-0.15 so not much!
keiferski
I understand the sentiment of this app but personally think it’s the opposite of what will actually solve acrimonious political discussions. In a democracy, opting out just means someone else decides for you.

I would really prefer to see AI tools used to summarize complex events and issues and then present them in a nuanced accessible way. Nearly every single political discussion I see happening nowadays is full of misconceptions, lack of knowledge, or just outright hatred of the opposite side.

Interestingly LLMs are pretty good at summarizing texts, which means they might be quite useful for this purpose. The hardest part I think is making it “cool” enough to actually get attention from the people that are overly-argumentative and from those that would prefer to just opt out. That thin line is the real sociopolitical challenge.

roenxi
> In a democracy, opting out just means someone else decides for you.

Someone else decides for you anyway. In any election it is hard to do more than decide what the most important issue is for you then vote for the person who best represents that issue. That means there isn't bandwidth to signal your stance on anything (except, literally, maybe one issue).

It is unusual for me to have an election where one of my top-5 issues is both represented and that the representative has a perspective that I would like to endorse. For the one that involves statistical education, I doubt any of the representatives I can vote for even have the training to understand what I want exactly. And that dynamic could only be replicated for anyone who doesn't choose what their top issues are by outsourcing the entire decision making process to the media.

I can summarise most of the topics in the political discourse without the use of AI - "this is a distraction and nobody is even pointing at a policy document they would like to implement". In fact, an AI to detect if there is a concrete proposal on any given issue would be quite welcome.

keiferski
This kind of fatalism is more and more common, and it can be hard to disagree with in a literal sense, but to me it mostly just indicates that democratic mechanisms need reform — and not that we ought to just stop caring and live with someone else deciding and democracy not “working.” Because that leads to some very bad situations, historically speaking.

I do like the idea of a tool that filters political speak from actual concrete proposals and likelihood of it being implemented.

roenxi
Democracy doesn't need reform, it works great. The real problem is people keep trying to ram tens or hundreds of solutions through a centralised system that can only be held accountable for 1 decision every few years and needs to concentrate on the military. There isn't a democratic way to process large numbers of issues without outsourcing the decision making because people can't think about that many disparate topics.
drivingmenuts
Or to put it another way:

There's nothing wrong with democracy. It's the people that are screwed up.

keiferski
Well that’s why I wrote democratic mechanisms, not democracy.
a9dhalaan
Until you have reform in the sense of replacing the First-past-the-post voting with a more representative system that allows the survival of more than 2 centrist parties, or have a system where there are meaningful referendums at a meaningful frequency, then where is the value of being "politically informed" on new/current politics?

Democracy in many western nations, at least in the US, is more or less an illusion of choice. Being sucked into the liberal/republican squabbling, drama and even the occasional political issue is nothing more than mere entertainment for the peasant class. For lobbies and corporations, who actually have much more leverage into governance, then yea being politically informed for them is prudent.

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ksynwa
I don't think the service aims to solve the problem of political discussions. It is for the type of person who either gets their political content from somewhere else or someone who is socioeconomically comfortable and perceives political discussions as noise.
keiferski
It is a tiny tool that pushes people further into echo chambers. Opting out into the “I don’t need to know anything about politics” is itself an echo chamber, usually by well-off people (as you mentioned.)

It would be really great to see people making little tools that go in the opposite direction.

krapp
We don't need people to make tools that go in the opposite direction. Politics is everywhere on the internet. No one needs a tool to find political opinions online any more than one needs a tool to find cockroaches in a sewer.
keiferski
I don’t think you understood my comment at all, the point of which was to create tools that help people understand each other better.
krapp
I don't think that's a problem that can be solved with technology. And sometimes people understand others perfectly well, and their choice to avoid those people isn't the result of ignorance or fear.
bityard
Hot takes and arguing with strangers on the Internet is not participating in democracy. It's just a hobby that some people have the spare time/energy for and some do not.
smegger001
I just don't use twiter/X or facebook. much lower failure rate of such posts making it through with my method
Navkun
Honestly that probably is the best alternative, but I still like to see the occasional high-signal post on twitter.
thinkingemote
There is a "mute" setting built into Twitter which you can populate with words and phrases and which will remove tweets containing those.

It's very powerful and easy to use but it seems that many early adopters are unaware of this simple setting! It's not fuzzy nor able to handle regex so a clever AI solution like this would fill that gap.

(I found that simply adding "trump" in 2016 improved my experience)

Navkun
Yeah I used the mute feature extensively (I must have 100+ muted words) but I still saw things that I didn't want to see, quite often, like ramblings of politics and outrage etc...

Now I have muted words + mindfirewall, I never see anything I don't want to.

thinkingemote
Yes it's a crude and blunt tool, your solution add good flexibility to it, bravo! I wonder if we will see more tools like this that uses ... AI discernment? ... to serve what the users desire.
richrichie
No, I wouldn’t use it. X already gives a lot of tools to customise what I see on my timeline.

Moreover, like immune system, the brain atrophies in a sterile, coddled environment.

qwertox
It also won't remain healthy in a toxic environment.
richrichie
Question is if it is really that toxic. There are many successful people on X. You can always follow who you want and manage topics of interest. It is quite possible to avoid both deranged Trump haters and Biden/Kamala haters who don’t add value.
qwertox
Not really. You archive that by liking, following, blocking and muting. And once you do that, you create an account which is very much an extreme bubble, because of the recommendation's engine profile which is generated for you, and which you can't tweak. You can't say: "Show me no politics, even from people I follow". You can't backlist topics. The auto-generated list is not helpful, because you can only uncheck auto-recommended topics.

"Ignore political tweets except those coming from politicians or journalists with at least x followers"

My Twitter account is very nice, because I only see AI and 3D programming stuff. No politics or other stuff. It's a bubble.

I have another Twitter account which is relatively new (in terms of "use", but exists since the beginnings), which I use to see what is getting posted about politics and which topics are trending, and I always end up in a bad mood, because there I see how horribly Twitter is getting used to promote hatred.

Maybe Twitter is more extreme in Germany, in terms of negativity, as there the far right has taken over. Add to this Elon's posts, who I wouldn't be surprised is living in an extreme bubble on Twitter, where all looks "nice" to him, in terms of "freedom of speech". I'm not sure if he's aware of what's really going on in Germany on his platform. It is extremely toxic. It adds no value to a democratic discourse.

Am I in a bubble because of my AI-3D-filtered account? No, because I also read news to stay informed about politics and society, but for others the other news sources are Telegram and TikTok.

ilovefood
Looks great :) it's exactly what I've built a year ago: LLM in the middle / client side content filtering using LLms.

- https://karimjedda.com/llms-in-the-middle-content-aware-clie...

Navkun
Loved the blog, I also built a version that used a local LLM but wasn't sure how to package that to a wider audience so went with openai instead :)
a9dhalaan
I was interested in giving it a shot, but i didn't see any setup instructions or anything i can download from that page. Is your extension available for use?
ilovefood
It isn't, the blog was just a high level recap of what I built, as I unfortunately don't have enough time to turn it into a product that can be used.

I'm very happy to see that someone is building it though, I really think that personal AIs/LLMs are the future.

a9dhalaan
You should still slap the code on github with a disclaimer that it's not stable/fully featured.
Brajeshwar
I think you get in touch with Goodable. There may be some synergy and interest.

https://goodable.co

Navkun
Interesting, are you connected with them? what's the best channel to talk?
Brajeshwar
The founder and I are part of On Deck and we had communicated.
NalNezumi
Love the idea.

I never used Twitter in my life until 2020,and only started using it due to my boss(researcher) recommending it as a good platform for getting up to date research publications/news. But I couldn't bare the noise. I also realized it can't be simply filtered.

I famous researcher I followed was very vocal about HK protest of the time. (understandably, as a local) and while I 100% sympathize, going on the platform to get research updates and get politics bombarded on me was too distracting to continue using it.

Is there any function to "white list" topic instead of blacklist? I'd probably be able to follow all researcher I wanted, if I could white-list only their work related tweets. It would also be nice if one could toggle it; sometimes I Do want to hear the opinions of those I respect and follow

Navkun
Agreed, I follow a ton of tech-bros on twitter and their constant ramblings of politics was one of the reason I built my extension in the first place.

We have a whitelist coming soon in the next version so hopefully you'll be able to follow your researchers without all the other stuff :)

EZ-E
Good idea. I might want to engage with political content but on my own terms. The way most platforms push rage baiting content to trigger engagement is unhealthy. With that being said most platforms allow you to mute the content you dislike. I have nearly successfully strong armed facebook into showing me cat pics and cat related content only. The past months on reddit, most of the default subs have been becoming casualties of the US election with content pushed in "mainstream" subs such as pics, music, art. It all feels very artificial and I had to unsub to most of them. Tiring, especially when being a non US person reading English content. I don't care about the latest outrage that will be forgotten in 1 week as the next one comes.
Navkun
Agreed, one of my favourite blog posts is this Farnam Street one on why you shouldn't read the news

https://fs.blog/stop-reading-news/

Like that haitan story every one was talking about last week, no ones knows if it was real or just BS. Better to just block it all out entirely.

gtsnexp
Can you create an application that processes Lex Fridman's podcasts and removes his voice?
_Microft
Maybe reading the transcripts of the podcasts would serve your purpose?
gtsnexp
That approach could work, but it may make it more difficult to consume content while exercising.
OLL_IE
Podcast -> Transcription —> Text to speech.
psb217
Hmm, I wonder if anyone has a simple pipeline for extracting data for "voice cloning" type models from the combination of original audio and transcribed text. It should be possible to chain this with some post-processing to replace Lex's voice with something more pleasing, and maybe throw in some automated rewriting of the transcript to remove the fluff.
gtsnexp
Excellent flowchart! Thank you
pogue
I would love to see this integrated into Bluesky too!

Bluesky even has 3rd party moderation filters called Ozone that let's a person a 'labeler service' that passes the posts from the firehose to it & apply a badge or hide posts that meet its criteria.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/ozone

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drones
How well does it deal with video/image content? My timeline occasionally jumpscares me with gore/graphic/political content.
Navkun
We are going to support images in the next version we release (ETA 1 week), in terms of videos not sure how we'd be able to do that currently but constantly experimenting. Have you tried the extension yet?
drones
No I have not. This is the killer feature for me though. Text based stuff I can just ignore or block, but the videos/images are what actually bother me (the abundance of porn on the site is what prevents me from using it in public).
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Shadowed_
"Download on Chrome". OK, whatever, bye.
Navkun
What's your preferred browser/medium?
Shadowed_
Firefox. Sorry for harsh comment but I'm increasingly annoyed by Chrome only approach on the Internet.