I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a "firewall" layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said "when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest". I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as "incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!". The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
We do everytime we click on a link tagged NSFW or when we go see negative comments.
That really just reenforces my point. Most people aren't setting that up themselves. The app defaults do that. I.e. someone/something else is making that determination. Sure, maybe you can still check out the post if you really want, but how many will do that? Can you change how it works? Depends on the app.
If people want to opt-in to it then I don't really care. I mostly HATE being forced to opt-out of things though.
Well then we can argue about defaults, but in an open source app, I think the point is moot: anyone can make a new version with different defaults.
[some content is masked, change the settings if you want to see it or disable this warning] sounds like an acceptable default over almost anything filterable in my opinion.