In the old days, you had to go looking for crushing existential horror. Now, you can just wake up and glance at literally¹ any social media site, and a bevy² of it will be waiting for you. That's where Google Chrome extension Sadblock comes in. It helps you out by cleaning up sad, triggering, and sometimes just plain annoying news from your social media feeds.

在过去，恐怖故事要自己去找才有得看。现在，你每天醒来后随便扫一眼任何社交媒体网站，都有一大堆恐怖故事在等着你。于是，谷歌扩展“悲伤屏蔽”应运而生。它能帮你扫除社交媒体动态上那些悲伤、刺激性或烦人的新闻。

Sadblock will help you "take back control of your social feeds," according to the extension's website. It does this by allowing you to block certain types of posts from your social media. "Current categories include sad stories, political posts, climate change posts, and those that include common trigger words," the site says. You can download Sadblock for free from the Chrome Web Store.

据该应用的网站称，“悲伤屏蔽”能帮你“重新掌控自己的社交媒体动态”。有了它，你就可以屏蔽社交媒体上特定类型的消息。该网站称：“目前可屏蔽的类型包括伤感故事、有关政治和气候变化的帖子，还有包含常见煽动性词汇的文章”。你可以从谷歌网店免费下载“悲伤屏蔽”应用。

The extension allows you to block these various kinds of content wholesale³, and its multi-site approach appears to be a step up from other blockers, most of which exist for one service only and require you to add in your own blacklisted keywords. For example, Tumblr Savior allows users to filter their Tumblr feed, but users must manually add words and tags they want to see blocked, like "death" or "Trump⁴." Twitter application TweetDeck has a Mute function, but also requires you to manually input⁵ words, phrases, and links you want banned from your feed.

这款扩展应用不但可以批量屏蔽掉各种内容，而且可以作用于多个网站，这令它胜过了许多其它屏蔽插件——大多数屏蔽插件只对一个网站起效，且需要你自行添加黑名单关键词。举例来说，Tumblr Savior能够过滤Tumblr上的消息，但用户必须手动添加屏蔽词汇及标签，如“死亡”、“特朗普”；TweetDeck拥有“静音”功能，但同样需要你手动输入希望屏蔽的词汇、短语和链接。

Sadblock's range allows you to block upsetting political content, or videos of abused animals, or stories about certain celebrities⁶. Its functionality allows people to block things that annoy or mildly upset them, but it also allows people who are triggered by seeing news about sexual assault to avoid it completely.

“悲伤屏蔽”能帮你屏蔽掉让人心烦的政治内容，受虐动物视频，或特定名人的消息。它不但能屏蔽掉让人讨厌或不爽的内容，还可以让受不了性侵新闻的人从此与之绝缘。

说到这里，你是否有所疑虑？你是否害怕这款应用将使人们无视真实世界里发生的事情？针对此问题，开发者表示：难道不去阅读那些可怕的消息，你就不知道现实世界的面貌吗？你只是想清静一会儿罢了，这没什么。

"At Sadblock we trust you already know the planet is struggling and that people all around the world are dying in terrible ways, and we won’t judge you for wanting to turn off the sad for a little while," the site adds. "Someone will bring it up at the water cooler tomorrow anyway."

该网站称：“我们相信，你就算不看那些新闻，也知道地球正处在水深火热中，世界各地的人们正以可怕的方式死去，如果你想暂时关掉悲伤频道，我们完全理解。反正第二天也会有人在饮水机旁提起这些新闻。”

Basically, Sadblock is intended to help people unwind and take a mental breather away from the constant influx⁷ of horrible information. It's not intended to help people ignore reality.

基本上，“悲伤屏蔽”意在帮助人们放松，从持续涌入的可怕信息中获得片刻喘息，而不是要帮助人们无视现实。

更何况，屏蔽掉这些让人不快的信息对人们的心理健康是有好处的。

Psychologist Dr. Graham Davey told Huffington Post that "[n]egative news can significantly change an individual’s mood — especially if there is a tendency in the news broadcasts to emphasize suffering and also the emotional components⁸ of the story. [...] Viewing negative news means that you’re likely to see your own personal worries as more threatening and severe, and when you do start worrying about them, you’re more likely to find your worry difficult to control and more distressing⁹ than it would normally be."

心理学家格拉汉姆•戴维医生告诉《赫芬顿邮报》说：“负面新闻可以极大地改变一个人的心情——尤其是如今传媒内容越来越爱强调苦难，并且着重描绘情感元素。……看负面新闻的后果就是，你会觉得自己的个人苦恼被加剧，变得更具威胁性，而且一旦苦恼起来，你会发现你的情绪难以控制，比往常更痛苦。”

那么，这款扩展难道就没有什么缺陷吗？记者试运行后给出了B评分。记者表示：

"Sadblock does reduce what you see that's troubling, but also inexplicably¹⁰ deletes innocuous posts and leaves a lot of distressing ones."

“‘悲伤屏蔽’会减少那些让人心烦的内容，但也会莫名其妙地删掉一些无伤大雅的消息，同时会保留很多让人郁闷的内容。”

但是不可否认的是，那些愤怒的政治帖和负面新闻少了很多。

And though the app is imperfect, it's important to recognize that Sadblock is still an incredibly useful tool for people who need to continue to engage with social media for work or companionship and want to protect their mental health while doing so.

尽管它并不完美，但对于那些出于工作或社交需要不得不继续使用社交媒体、但又想要保护心理健康的人而言，“悲伤屏蔽”依然是个非常给力的工具。