Re:Study conspiracy theories with compassion
by cycomanic on Saturday April 02, 2022 @09:52AM
(#30888291)
Good luck! It's incredibly hard, not breaking the friendship. I had to block my friend, I just could take discussions any longer. I was being insulted every time and was mentally completely exhausted. Just thinking about it already increases my heartrate.
I'm wondering about your friend. In hindsight I can see some of the behaviour also in how he was when he was young. He always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder (some of it justified being a Turkish emigrant in Germany), and always blamed bad things happening to him on outside influences never on his own behaviour. Very similar how he argues about conspiracies. Is/was that similar with your friend? I'm wondering if there is some pattern.
Re:Study conspiracy theories with compassion
by JoelMcCracken on Saturday April 02, 2022 @08:25AM
(#30887688)
Very interesting! I’ve wondered about doing something similar. I hope this is followed up on.
> while at the same time those same sources get used easily for their own arguments
100% this!
Telegram channels and Substack seem to be super popular for this sort of propaganda. I also did a technical analysis of many of the websites shared in these channels and found:
- they use very heavy trackers
- keylogging for webpages is common
- they all use privacy shields for `whois` info
- third party cookies
You can find some of these if you want to take a look in https://github.com/Langer81/Summer-REU-Research