Re:The Social Media Problem
by anigbrowl on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @10:17PM
(#24139312)
I also enjoy reading conspiracy theories (as opposed to subscribing to them) and in general agree with your first point, but I think you overlook the degree to which they can be weaponized.
COVID-19 disinformation is absolutely weaponized and that's literally killing people on a daily basis. Likewise, while the objections to 5g in my local community are merely an annoying inconvenience from naive technophobes, in some places it's manifested as attacks on physical infrastructure which are quasi-organized; there are forums where techniques are seeded, shared and refined with an underlying purpose of spreading those attacks to other forms of infrastructure.
The basic problem is that while bad ideas may spread on their own because they satisfy some emotional or pseudo-rational need of the recipients who then go on to reproduce the idea, the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor doesn't really take account of wilful subversion.
COVID-19 disinformation is absolutely weaponized and that's literally killing people on a daily basis. Likewise, while the objections to 5g in my local community are merely an annoying inconvenience from naive technophobes, in some places it's manifested as attacks on physical infrastructure which are quasi-organized; there are forums where techniques are seeded, shared and refined with an underlying purpose of spreading those attacks to other forms of infrastructure.
The basic problem is that while bad ideas may spread on their own because they satisfy some emotional or pseudo-rational need of the recipients who then go on to reproduce the idea, the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor doesn't really take account of wilful subversion.