(A series in which I ramble some personal perspective on ICYDAK's "30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Daily Life," because most of this stuff is just default daily life to me.)
ICYDAK: 30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Everyday Life
#1: know your rights
#2: secure your communications
Follow multiple outlets, especially those that analyze power, like ProPublica or local independent journalists.
Friends: I am a librarian. I was BORN for this moment. Here is a one-step way to diversify your news sources and also a multi-step way. (I use both daily.)
RefDesk is your one-stop shop for online reference materials, which includes an auto-updated news feed. This is on the right if you're on desktop and the first thing in the queue on mobile. Use the dropdown menu at the top to change which source RefDesk pulls headlines from. (Note: some sources are paywalled; others are not.)
Bookmark RefDesk. Check the news there daily. Look at multiple news sources. You're welcome.
Allow me to sing to you the praises of the RSS feed reader.
Actually, no: I'mma let Cory Doctorow do it for me.
Cory Doctorow: You should be using an RSS reader
Tl;dr an RSS reader is your news/blogs/etc, when you want it, no ads, no comment sections, no one tracking your "engagement," read-it-anywhere pocket friend. Anytime you read something (a news site, a Substack, an article you clicked on somewhere) and you want to keep track of that site, look for its RSS feed. Try searching for "[name of site] RSS feed" if you can't find it on the website. RSS Finder can help too:
There's also a Chrome extension that can help with this (also works on Brave and Degoogled Chromium):
This is where I keep stuff I can't quickly access on RefDesk. I like ProPublica, bellingcat, 404 Media, Techdirt (best political reporting anywhere for some reason???), Ars Technica, and the Pew Research feeds. (Honestly, if you're trying to diversify your news and also understand "what's really going on," I cannot recommend following Pew Research highly enough.)
I also have a local independent news outlet focused on my city and two that focus on the state. I found them by searching "[name of city/state] independent journalism". Finally, I threw in some blogs I like to read, because why not? I have an RSS reader! I can do anything I want!
Which actual RSS app you use is up to you. I use Tidings, a Sailfish-native app. It does the job without trying to look fancy about it, which is all I want from an RSS reader.
Finally: when diversifying your news sources, DO NOT GET THEM FROM SOCIAL MEDIA.
If you find a link to something and reading it prompts you to put that thing in your RSS reader, that's one thing. But please do NOT simply read a headline on social media and then insert it into conversations like you understood the whole conversation from the headline. Definitely do not share the article with a comment based solely on the headline.
I know it's really, REALLY easy to do. I used to do it all the time. It was only when I got away from social media and started reading multiple news sources a day that I realized how little I was contributing to any conversation by doing that. I was making a lot of conversations worse. I did not want to be involved in worse conversations.
Go forth and learn!
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