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

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

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 :)

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.

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!

"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.

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!

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Or to put it another way:

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

Well that’s why I wrote democratic mechanisms, not democracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* Sign in with Google is a dealbreaker for me - please allow email/password

* Subscription fatigue - I'd like to be able to use my own OpenAI API key or a local LLM

* To avoid filter bubbles, it would be nice to have filter strengths per topic (e.g. block 80% of US Politics, 60% of Ukraine/Russia war)

I like the concept, but i wasn't able to get it to filter anything, even when i used a tag, "technology" that my homepage is filled with and it didn't filter anything (I did a "Save options" and a page refresh, tried the power button in both states (it's not obvious to me, or chatgpt-vision which is the on-state, but regardless i tried both and nothing was blocked)). Any troubleshooting tips? (and set a todo to fix the on/off button ui)

unrelated: for youtube are you classifying the content purely based on the title? or are you digging deeper and looking at the description and thumbnail and comments? Is there a second where the content is visible before it is blocked/hidden?

Just checked your account, if you could press the button on the top right and make it look like the power (without the slash) and then save? since it looks like it isn't enabled on your end.

And yeah still very early will be improving the UI a ton and taking into account your suggestions for the next version.

In terms of youtube, currently we just take into account the title, sometimes it is visible before hidden/blocked but we usually process within ~700ms so vast majority of the time you wouldn't see it.

I tried again, and now it's working - and yes it is reasonably fast but i wonder once you start adding vision it will likely increase your response time, to the point that you may need to consider a temporary blur until the content is vetted.

Anyways good work on the tool, it has potential even at just blocking inline ads and spam.

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

Sounds healthy to live in a padded room, rather than learning to ignore when you don't want to engage.

It's a tricky balance. Once the signal to noise gets bad enough, even if the cost of ignoring individual events is low enough, the cumulative cost of ignoring so much overwhelms any positive value. Twitter now seems bad enough that it's like living in an interesting area with horrible noise pollution and high crime rates. Over time it just sucks the life out of you. It might make sense to try and change things if it were a public good, but it's not, and Elon seems to want it this way, so it won't improve, so for many people it makes more sense to leave.

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?

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?

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?

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.

Yeah I think I'll make the free plan better, thanks for mentioning that.

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.

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.

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.

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 [email protected]

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

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...

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 :)

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?

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.

You should still slap the code on github with a disclaimer that it's not stable/fully featured.

I think once you get to the point where you're actively taking steps to remove the main content of a site, you might as well just stop using it.

You might as well go to Youtube with a plugin to disable all video playback, or visit a discussion board with a user stylesheet to hide all comments.

It depends on what you go on X for, I agree most people probably go on X to read some combination of politics or news but likewise I know many people like myself who just want to use it to read people talking about tech or business without all the politics BS.

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

dystopic

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.

It also won't remain healthy in a toxic environment.

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.

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.

I think you get in touch with Goodable. There may be some synergy and interest.

https://goodable.co

Interesting, are you connected with them? what's the best channel to talk?

The founder and I are part of On Deck and we had communicated.

How well does it deal with video/image content? My timeline occasionally jumpscares me with gore/graphic/political content.

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?

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).

Just what I've been looking for. Will you support filtering images too? And any chance of this being open source?

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.

Amazing concept, if I may ask what are your usage costs for say 5 minutes of browsing for a single user on reddit?

I use it daily for a few hours and that costs us about $0.1-0.15 so not much!

Can you create an application that processes Lex Fridman's podcasts and removes his voice?

Maybe reading the transcripts of the podcasts would serve your purpose?

That approach could work, but it may make it more difficult to consume content while exercising.

Podcast -> Transcription —> Text to speech.

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.

Excellent flowchart! Thank you

Why don't you just use the timeline with people you follow?

filters out what you believe to be political, and we disagree

Well if you set one of your filter tags to 'politics' it will block out ALL tweets related to politics regardless of left or right wing. Hope that helps!

What's your preferred browser/medium?

Firefox. Sorry for harsh comment but I'm increasingly annoyed by Chrome only approach on the Internet.

less echo chamber than it is a sound proof room

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).

I just don't use twiter/X or facebook. much lower failure rate of such posts making it through with my method

Honestly that probably is the best alternative, but I still like to see the occasional high-signal post on twitter.