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.
Emotion != information
You can know that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going on without having to put pictures of maimed bodies inside your news feed. Actually I have blocked people I actually agree with just because they could not stop spamming angrily about it. I have also a militant ecologist friend who thinks saving the planet implies pushing the most anxiety inducing news as much as possible. Blocked.
I don't think that blocking the content that focus on pathos locks us up in a bubble, that's quite the opposite. Emotions block analysis.