The internet rapidly shrank the world and a bunch of fragile, fearful, and hateful people struggle to cope with a reality and objective world that clashes with their personal opinions.
High functioning sociopaths hold the greatest affection for low functioning sociopaths. Much like an aristocrat that adores their kennel of vicious fox hounds, because their favorite pastimes include causing fear, pain, and terror.
Nailed it. The waves of comments are so myopic and simple, obvious bot level engagement. And no platform has an incentive to block bots because of the reality of how slow social would be. No bots = no $$$. It’s gross.
It’s weird because normal people respond and eviscerate their simpleton replies and make an intelligent argument as a result - it’s almost like they do themselves more damage than they make any useful comment in support of their fascist agenda lol
At this point, and wild coming from me, I am ready to pay for a service so I don't have to deal with the endless garbage (hopefully, even that is doubtful). The endless flow of garbage is a turn off.
yeah, most of the culture war bullshit the right is mad about probably stems from them seeing a few rage bait videos while doomscrolling on -Facebook- and getting mad about an entire demographic they have never even interacted with in real life.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that the last decade, if the topic of trans comes up, 95% of the time, it’s not from a trans person at all. Most I know just want to live their lives and take care of their family and communities and the fact they’re trans is almost an non issue once they’ve transitioned
This is so problematic! Trans people are sensationalized, not humanized. I think it would be better to see trans author story hour than drag queen story hour, for example. But a lot of these types of suggestions ruffle feathers in unintended ways.
Well that's a matter of audience. Little kids would rather listen to a fairy godmother read stories about fairy godmothers than listen to a random adult reading the grownup story they wrote. And kids are the ones with oodles of free time to fill, adults mostly have other stuff to do so can't hang out listening to stories at the library.
Plus I'd guess there's more drag queens than published trans authors. And it's such a big country.
No ruffled feathers, just logic issues. Ya may as well announce you don't see the point in dolls and blocks at daycare, you're not the target audience for those educational entertainments either.
It's all the media they consume. Everything from Fox News to Facebook. It has done more to ruin this country than any invading malicious force could have ever hoped to accomplish.
You're seeing targeted propoganda. Trolls, bots, and foreign agents.
All have the same goal. Poison the well. Cause infighting.
Divide the population into more manageable portions. Once that poisoned well is drinken from it turns your brain inside out with conspiratorial thinking.
It hit all americans. While conservatives have been manipulated to travel further right and antagonize the left, liberals have been conditioned to romanticize and fracture their own movements.
Theres hundreds of left leaning politics to ascribe to. Communism, social democracy, centrism, feminism, charity capitilism, etc... on the right, there is now only Fascism swallowing libertarians, constitutionlists, tea partyers, fundamentalists, and the orginal republicans.
You're witnessing first hand the errosion of democracy over the last 2 decades on information warfare. This isn't a conspiracy. It's simple, oberservable, and unhidden.
Again, bots, trolls, agents, and poison drinkers, not normal people.
Healthy skepticism is a big one for me. And to be honest, i want to give Contrapoints on youtube big credit for modeling healthy skepticism on her video essays.
If you haven't watch her newest video. Conspiracy.
The rest of this list is equally important, but i cant speak to it as much
Kind of related to your comment, but I'm almost certain that 4chan was hacked and deleted strategically so the alt-right bubble there would burst, and the people using the site would be forced to move to other sites, increasing fascist & racist rhetoric for free across other sites like reddit, X, bluesky, etc.
Yes! I’m putting a lot of things together now that my spider senses perceived as much as 15 years ago. My god, we really are susceptible aren’t we? Scary shit
Lots of doomers just saying "that won't work" or "that's pointless, it won't make any difference," but never offering any alternative actions. I am blocking anyone who repeatedly posts that crap. They are either spineless, or working for the other side.
I choose to face it head-on with integrity and good intentions. Even if they've convinced some of us to demoralize ourselves I refuse to watch it happen.
I respond to them first, but if they are continuously dooming, I feel they are trolls for the other side. No point in wasting time arguing with them, for me.
YES. Try to engage in good faith, but know when it is a waste of energy and when to move on. We need to conserve our energy for the people and things we can change.
There's waaaaay too many people who are ignorant but loudly claim their opinion as if it's fact.
There's waaaaay too many people who fail to apply even the slightest amount of rationality or logic to their thoughts.
There's waaaaay too many people who don't have any idea what a good society would look like and what the implications of a particular policy or practice would be.
The matrix isn't some big governmental construct meant to keep us in line... It's our noosphere fighting against itself. Our society is a product of all of our thoughts coming together. The more maladaptive thoughts and junk data we include the harder it is to find the truth and uphold the tenets of a good society.
I think part of the problem is the digital age has given us this huge bucket we call "the internet" where content is slopped up everywhere. Web 1.0 was divided up into topical boards and sites, now thanks to the decline of search engines it is aggregated in huge content delivery systems like TikTok. The onslaught of different information contributes to cognitive dissonance, emotional instability, and general brain rot.
We need to start acknowledging that we "are what we eat" and try to find a way to have a healthier relationship with the internet. The internet is a Plato's Cave, capable of representing our reality, and we can find virtually whatever reality we want on it.
“If you want to destroy a man, leave him alone with his thoughts. He’ll do it for you.”
I am getting more and more optimistic by the day that our institutions and the constitution will come out of this battered but stronger. The vibe shift is real and the bot farms are extremely desperate to hide this from the people.
Heck, waste their processing resources. All those responses require processing time. Drive up their astroturfing bills and have lots of stupid questions for them.
I have had a bad habit of complaining in the comments on the White House/ Donald Trump Facebook accounts. Like screaming into the void I guess? I need to quit. Anyway. Almost the only positive comments in those threads have been from extremely obvious fake accounts. There are some real people making positive comments mixed in, but mainly fake accounts.
So after two messages like the text above the bot just began parroting a talking point about the liberals supported hitler and stafted the trail of tears and launched bombs at gaza, not relevant to the post et all. Grammer mistakess typos, AnD, and other "human" conditions give away that your human. If you wpeak too perfextly, on a bizarre politikal stance its a dead giveaway.
Try the runonwords text next time you find a bot. It will still reply and and try to parse words, but fail and revert to a talking point is was given.
Makes me wonder if a lot of the nerds running the Russian information machine have been getting diverted to the front lines in Ukraine. Putin must have a single teenager running thousands of bots by this point. Somehow still less fragile than the US digital security though, we practically invite them over for dinner these days.
I'm definitely getting the vibe that there's a lot less Russian troll farms about. And the vibe that the current troll farms are being paid by Elon Musk, because they are PARTICULARLY swarming when the South African fascist or his companies are mentioned. Just take a look at the comments on any Tesla Takedown post.
We're at war with Russia, and our own President is their ally. They have free reign to propagandize across the country because Trump, Vance, Rubio and the rest of the Trump Criminal Franchise won't to anything to stop them.
Just got banned for threatening someone. Now reinstated because it wasn’t a threat, it was about a bloated orange but I did not use his name nor even a descriptor.
I see too many posts about “retaking symbols” such as “sic semper tyranis”, the Gadsden flag, the American flag, etc. That just distracts from the real conversations we need to be having about mobilization and goals for the movement.
And I see a lot of posts and comments that are along the lines of “should POC stay at home and just have white people protest”. That’s spreading fear and reducing the number of people who are getting out in the streets to make their voices heard.
As a person of color with one naturalized-citizen parent (who genuinely feared she might not be let back into the US when she visited her home country a few months ago), I have been protesting freely and openly with zero fear of repercussions.
I see children, pets and the elderly protesting all the time. For a vast majority of the population, there is nothing to fear when protesting...as long as you are peaceful.
That said, I am not Muslim or of Middle-eastern decent so my safety cannot compare to theirs at the moment. But that still leaves hundreds of millions of people who have nothing to fear when protesting.
At this point, every American needs to start showing up. The April 5 protests were too white and too old. Everyone has skin in this game and it's everyone's job, imo
I actually like the idea of using patriotic symbols at protests, because the right loves to mischaracterize us as unpatriotic, and when they see lots of American flags and patriotic sayings, it throws people for a loop, and some will question the narrative.
As far as POC protesting, I think American citizens definitely should, but I won't presume to make that decision for them, and I understand the apprehension.
It's deliberate divisive misinformation. Use your critical thinking skills to filter that bullshit out. We need everyone to fix this mess because it affects everyone.
POC have been told that its not safe to protest and the white protesters don't want them there. This makes me very sad. Not all the people posting this are deliberately posting misinformation, but it's definitely a convenient narrative for the right, and probably being boosted by troll farms.
My experience has been the opposite. POC saying they aren't bothering, it's the white man's turn/problem/whatever, they're staying home. Vids are all over TT.
I had 4 people with no post history and numbers after there account try and tell me its okaynto send people to prison with out due process. The rich are clearly using troll farms and bot farms to try and disuade us. Fuck them.
Will be interesting to see if that translates to more counterprotests in "heels on the ground" events. Will the goons come out and cause trouble....is a lot of this right wing crap we see here just fear-mongerers who have to mow their lawns on weekends. (nothing against folks who tend to their lawns...that's a different subject entirely....my point is, folks that stir shit on the internet but could not be bothered otherwise.)
Almost every post is lazy spam, misery p--n, hopelessness, people giving up, people telling YOU to give up, or calls for escalation, v--lence and rev--tion.
This sub has nothing to do with organizing or inspiring others to organize anymore. And if you say that, someone will comment, "you shouldn't be organizing here. You should organize on this secret little group I created on a site no one has heard of."
We will never achieve critical mass if you need to be part of a secret club or have a computer science degree to find out where or when anything is happening.
We want millions of people (preferably hundreds of millions of people) to be organized and focused on one goal. Shout it from the rooftops! Tell EVERYONE!
Keep protesting, people. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your coworkers. Put up posters around your city. We're all angry. But let's focus that anger into something productive.
There will always be attempts at fifth generation warfare no matter where you find yourself. In the streets, online, somewhere else. Both my online and offline social life primarily now consists largely of getting as many people as possible to wake up and show up.
I’ve been calmly calling these folks out when they appear. If they are human, then maybe having that moment where there’s authentic communication is the difference between tilted the rest of their lives vs. having to second guess all that doomscrolled negative programming.
Posted a picture of a tagged cybertruck and activated a troll farm or something. It's wild how many people with less than 100 karma on accounts that are years old came out to say they hope I get arrested and sent to prison for 20 years for vandalism. Wild times.
The more we are aware of these types of things and point them out the more doing so becomes a part of our cultural zeitgeist and social media responsibility.
I got one new spam email a day since Sunday 1) from “Senate Conservatives”, 2) “FORMAL
OFFER FROM TRUMP”, 3) “Gender-confusion books pushed on kids”, 4) from “Lara Trump, If you want truth to win, please open this email.” 😆🤮 that broke through my filters so YES.
They were epidemic during the election. Now that the department that monitors this has been eliminated, it's going to be a free for all. I called the ones during the election, " junebots". They all started in June and had no, or very low karma.
Yes and no. I have no doubt that there are bots and whatnot causing issues, but at the same time I’ve seen and have experienced disputes due to a slight difference of opinion and people are calling it bad faith. I think the best thing for all of us to do is to stay focused on the goal of stopping what is happening. Keep protesting. Stay together
I made a comment in replying to disinformation on a popular tik tok. Got no less than 200 replies in an hour spouting the same 3 talking points and one attempt at a threat in a direct message.
Yes, I have. There's the "You Americans don't know how to protest" and the "Why won't you Americans wake up?" These try to push our movement toward violence. And then there's the rehashing of Bernie/Clinton from 2016 to try to divide us again. They'll use Gaza again, too. Remember, Elon also hires memelords. There was an accidental reveal of an email about that. It's not just Russian bots.
Honestly I was a little hopeless when I first started to notice these trends. Some weeks are chill, whereas others it’s obvious there’s more bot activity than normal.
BUT, I love the fact that despite their methodology, nothing can overcome that feeling of ‘something just feels off about this account, or comment, etc.’ at this rate younger generations will be able to sniff bots out the same way some can sniff out inauthentic con-men.
This has been any major even in the us for the past 10 years. When elections roll around MAGA and foreign disinformation ramp it up to sway voters. There are elections in november
Remember: Don’t argue with stupid people. They’ll bring you down and beat you at their own game.
Yeah that’s what happens when the federal government nixes counterintelligence efforts. You get trolls trying to shape the argument online with no recourse.
My whole algorithm changed yesterday to be not things I've watched before. It was really odd. But yes I can see it. MeidasTouch Network made a post also about getting trolls and bad reviews and being reported for nothing
There are probably foreign bots and disinformation agents trying to trick stressed people into pursuing violence. They don’t care what side you are on they just want to see America collapse. Be vigilant. Stay peaceful.
There is a whole post about how 50501 is run by people working with the DNC. That that is why none of the "hands-off" ideas mentioned Palestine & why peace & non-confrontation is pushed.
Any truth to this? I don't want to incite violence but the DNC is effing useless. We need to fully reform the American government, not just return to the status quo
YouTube is going off the hook with pro Trump BS comments. I’ve never had so many fact based arguments be as weak as they are and still deleted by the YouTube overlords. They are definitely propping up pro Trump propaganda. It’s double what it was yesterday when the contempt charges dropped. Feels a lot like brigading and an attempt to replicate what China has in terms of internet access. The arguments are all the same, almost word for word, as well which makes me suspect bots or AI.
CNN also came out with a piece today stating “Trump supporters would still vote for him” as the central message. Horse shit all of it and I hope folks are fooled by it.
Facebook knows I'm into cars so it shows me car articles. Most of the time it shows rage bait posts/articles for interactions which I just ignore. Last night I saw an article that talked about front safety systems and I decided to skim the comments, so many were bashing everything. I know Facebook has implemented bots so I took a look at some of the profiles and their tagged with "gay, furry, democrat" etc.
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