Re:Meteorologists Get Death Threats as Hurricane Conspiracy ...
by mistrial9 on Thursday October 10, 2024 @02:23PM
(#41801691)
not really -- rather consider the ability of a very small minority of voices to amplify tremendously without sufficient dampening.. stability in public communication is never simple. A psychologist might say that social rage itself, or anger with blame itself, is the root of the behavior. Every language group on Earth has rational, constructive people in it.
Re:Meteorologists Get Death Threats as Hurricane Conspiracy ...
by red-iron-pine on Friday October 11, 2024 @02:21PM
(#41811908)
> rather consider the ability of a very small minority of voices to amplify tremendously without sufficient dampening
Strongly recommend reading about Wayne Wheeler -- the guy who made Prohibition happen.
Prohibition was not especially popular in the US, even before it passed. But Wheeler was able to make a small minority sound very, very loud, and lever politicians accordingly
You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.
You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.
The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.