What Your Feed Won’t Show You: Staying Informed Without Losing Your Peace

UBUNTU VILLAGE · MENTAL HEALTH · AFRICAN WISDOM · DIGITAL STORYTELLING · COMMUNITY POWER

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with trying to stay informed. You open the app to know what’s happening, and within minutes, you are watching someone die, reading a thread about a policy that threatens your community, absorbing grief that hasn’t been processed by anyone—least of all the algorithm that surfaced it for you—and being asked to like, share, and react.

This is not what information is supposed to do.

Your ancestors understood something about knowledge that the news cycle has forgotten: not all information deserves the same weight, and the person who holds a community’s knowledge has a responsibility not just to gather it but to filter it—for truth, for context, for the wellness of the people who will carry it forward.

The Griot Knew What to Carry

Before news feeds, before newspapers, before radio, there were griots. West and Central African societies understood that the person who held communal knowledge was not simply a vessel—they were a discerner. Griots knew which stories to tell, in which order, to which audience, and at which moment. They understood that information without context is not knowledge. And they understood that what you put into a community’s body politic — what you feed the collective consciousness — shapes what that community believes is possible.

We have not evolved beyond the need for that discernment. What has changed is that the curation is now done by an algorithm designed to maximize your time on the app, not your understanding of the world.

The Feed Is Not a Neutral Curator

As we explore in our piece on algorithmic suppression, the content that surfaces in your feed is not what is most important—it is what generates the most reaction. Outrage surfaces faster than analysis. Trauma circulates faster than healing. And content from Black communities, particularly content about Black organizing and resistance, is demonstrably suppressed by the same platforms that profit from Black cultural production.

This means that “staying informed” by scrolling is not a neutral act. You are not seeing the full picture. You are seeing what the architecture wants you to react to.

Where to Actually Look

Independent Black and diaspora media have always carried the stories that mainstream outlets miss, distort, or arrive at twenty years too late. Some places worth your regular attention:

For U.S. Black community news: Capital B News, Colorlines, The Root, and Scalawag — which centers the U.S. South and speaks to justice, race, and culture with depth and accountability.

For African and diaspora global news: African Arguments, The Continent (a weekly newsletter designed to be shared—one PDF, all of Africa); and Global Voices, which amplifies community journalists from across the Global South.

For policy and advocacy: The Crisis (the NAACP’s publication and the oldest continuously published Black magazine in the country) and Democracy Now!, which consistently centers voices the mainstream media excludes.

These are not the only options — your own community likely has local outlets, newsletters, and organizers doing this work. Find them. Subscribe. Pay when you can. The infrastructure of Black information depends on Black investment.

The Ubuntu Filter

Ubuntu philosophy holds, “I am because we are.” What this means for information consumption is that you do not receive news as an isolated individual — you receive it as a member of a community, with responsibility for what you carry and what you pass on.

Before you share something, a few questions are worth sitting with:

Is this true? Have you checked it against a second source, ideally one not owned by the same parent company as the first?

Is this mine to carry? Some information is heavy in ways that will cost you more than it clarifies. You are allowed to set it down.

Does sharing this serve my community, or does it feed a cycle? Outrage that has no outlet becomes despair. If you share grief, also share a response, a resource, or an action.

Does this center us as protagonists or as victims? The stories we circulate about ourselves shape what we believe we can do.

Staying Informed Without Losing Your Peace

Staying informed is an act of care — for your community, for your people, for the future you are helping to build. But care does not require martyrdom. The spiritual and psychological toll of constant news consumption is real, documented, and disproportionate for Black people who see their communities represented primarily through violence, crisis, and loss.

A few practices worth building into how you engage:

Set a time for news, and close it when the time is done. The world will not be saved in the next scroll. Presence is also a form of resistance.

Seek solutions journalism alongside crisis reporting. What is being built? What is working? Where are communities winning? These stories exist — you have to look for them intentionally, because the algorithm will not surface them unprompted.

Rest is not disengagement. Knowing when your vessel is full and stepping away is ancestral wisdom, not privilege.

Talk to your people. Not just about what’s happening, but about how you’re holding it. Community processing is not optional — it is how we have always survived what the world throws at us.

The griot did not carry the community’s history alone. They were surrounded by people who helped them remember, process, and decide what was worth passing on. You are not meant to do this alone, either.

Stay informed. Stay rooted. Stay connected to the people who help you make meaning of what you know.

Sources

• Capital B News
• Colorlines
• The Root
• Scalawag
• African Arguments
• The Continent
• Global Voices
• The Crisis — NAACP
• Democracy Now!
• The Feed Is Not Neutral: Algorithmic Suppression and the Communities It Was Built to Silence — Ubuntu Village

Related links

• Why You Should Embrace Your Shadow Self
• Tweet and Repeat: The Wild World of Online Political Engagement
• The Power of Networking: How Staying Connected Can Benefit You
• Kenya’s Current Political Situation: A Nation at the Crossroads
• Ubuntu Village Solar Power Initiative

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