> Social media has made it wildly easy and incredibly cheap to propagate any misinformation. Head over 4chan and you'll see a factory line of ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks - which is then further spread across social media.
4chan has always been like this. Pre-2007 it was basically the boiler room of the internet. You could find memes before they hit mainstream along with all the shitty ones that didn't make the cut.
I'm sure this natural filtering was disrupted when we brought millions of users online for the first time and convinced them that social media is the internet.
The is true and is just more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind.
more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind
Whose fault is that though?
It is our fault too. But most people don't care. It is easier to just be A or B. It doesn't help that government officials keep stacking the deck to keep things as is and let money run the game. It is hard to break the corruption cycle when a $1M donation to both political parties all but guarantees you a $1B government contract. We really a way to pass resolutions that bypass Congress sometimes.
Re:A Worsening Culture War
by florencebuzz on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @09:45AM
(#25209731)
Pray tell - what misinformation do you find on 4chan that is so worth propagating to the rest of the internet?
The conspiracy theory growth cycle is pretty clear after all these years: something originates on 4chan, is picked up by some independent blog that editoralizes and sanitizes it. The blog post is then spread through Facebook and Twitter before it lands back on 4chan, but now legitimized by coverage on more "mainstream" web (by 4chan's standards anyway).
The Flat Earth conspiracy was easily the best example of this
If you were a foreign power and wanted to sow discord in a rival country, you had to buy off dozens of journalists and funnel money to media houses and hope that they'd at least be secretive, if not effective.
Now you can just pop open Photoshop, come up with 10 memes in 30 minutes, and use your sock puppet accounts to spread them everywhere - an operation that a single person can handle all by himself.
It's incredibly naive to think that social media is not absolutely flooded with propaganda and counter-propaganda by malicious actors. And it's only going to hasten the collapse in democratically minded countries across the world.