2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing

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BLM is favoured by big techTM
Antifa's biggest muscle is doxxing and getting people fired through social media
DSA can barely organize a petition

Who's getting McCarthied?
 
Jimmy Dore? I don't know, ask her. I just thought it was amusing to see such an LA progressive Bernie..sis? worried about the same thing only a crazy white supremacist would worry about.
 
i said nothing of blm or the dsa, and antifatm using social media to dox people doesn't somehow mean that they don't get randomly suspended.

it's nobody you've heard of or care about but that's kinda the whole point.
 
i said nothing of blm or the dsa, and antifatm using social media to dox people doesn't somehow mean that they don't get randomly suspended.

it's nobody you've heard of or care about but that's kinda the whole point.
Thank you for your service, secret Antifa supersoldier Monty.
 
Let's hope that the whole twitter Trump thing results in a comprehensive social media public regulation rather soon.

And this is the main issue really imo. All of this mess is caused by social media spreading lies like wildfire with no consequences for the company. Sure, Trump has exploited this phenomenon, but he did not create it. I do find the thought that a couple of billionaires can decide what gets shared and what doesn't get shared terrifying. But I felt that way before of Trump's ban, which was long overdue.
 
All of this mess is caused by social media spreading lies like wildfire with no consequences for the company.

How can there really be consequences for the company? Facebook and Twitter are unimaginably large. They have a hard time keeping gore, propaganda and even child pornography off their platforms even at the best of times and have to rely on algorithms which are by their nature one step behind the people spreading it. Unless you turn social media into a fully sterile curated site like netflix or something, there really isn't anything that can be done. As vile a person as Mark Zuckerberg is I think too much blame is put on him when Facebook already deletes groups at the drop of a hat and is overzealous at detecting inflammatory language or reposts of conspiracy images. My main scepticism with this claim is that Twitter and Facebook were cesspits of conspiracy, lies and shock images for almost a decade before trump was even elected, but even now that they're much more sanitised people are blaming QAnon on Facebook (There's a really stupid image to this effect that Elon Musk shared that got shown on BBC News for some stupid reason). I don't doubt that social media played a role as a vector, but so did Television, Radio and every other mass media which has existed for almost 100 years.

Anyway the main culprit of this kind of stuff isn't actually Facebook or Twitter, it's Whatsapp, which has already been "responsible" for literally causing ethnic tensions in India, and has got in way more trouble with governments because stuff gets shared peer to peer and is much harder to trace when it goes viral.
 
Here's a more psychology-focussed video about Qanon which is pretty interesting.


Right in the soul.

I mean this sincerely and without calling out anyone, and this is very personal and cathartic for me, but the reason why I mentally or psychologically or philosophically or whatever divorced myself from the left was because I stand by that I see parallels with irrational right-leaning people. At the very least with online leftists and their hate boners for liberals. You can apply the theoretical framework that the person explains up to halfway in the video to online leftists, but with their own unique characteristics, imo.

Jaime, who is a socialist, and has been part of Sam Seder's Majority Report (Sam Seder is the best), blatantly said that she would do what happened on Capitol Hill (overriding a democratic election by force) if there was enough socialistic support for it in the US. The reaction some online leftists had to Capitol Hill, weirdly fantasizing it was them in there, was pain. When more respectable leftists like AOC stop LARPing and decide to try to bring about actual change, and actually try to help people, they just lose their edge and become boring (but actually very important) social democrat types, and suddenly too many leftists turn against them.

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You can apply the theoretical framework that the person explains up to halfway in the video to online leftists

I agree. The only difference with me is that I'm not going to overcompensate and virtue signal as "not a leftist" just because some suburban freaks with no material pressure in their lives happen to have co-opted my views. You can't use online politics (i.e. twitter and podcasts) to inform your belief structure because by and large those people have superficial aesthetic reasons for their beliefs and will say whatever makes them feel better.

Calling yourself a leftist is very stupid however and I find it insane how people who basically just want healthcare and trains will refer to themselves using a mccarthyist slur.
 
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How can there really be consequences for the company? Facebook and Twitter are unimaginably large. They have a hard time keeping gore, propaganda and even child pornography off their platforms even at the best of times and have to rely on algorithms which are by their nature one step behind the people spreading it. Unless you turn social media into a fully sterile curated site like netflix or something, there really isn't anything that can be done. As vile a person as Mark Zuckerberg is I think too much blame is put on him when Facebook already deletes groups at the drop of a hat and is overzealous at detecting inflammatory language or reposts of conspiracy images. My main scepticism with this claim is that Twitter and Facebook were cesspits of conspiracy, lies and shock images for almost a decade before trump was even elected, but even now that they're much more sanitised people are blaming QAnon on Facebook (There's a really stupid image to this effect that Elon Musk shared that got shown on BBC News for some stupid reason). I don't doubt that social media played a role as a vector, but so did Television, Radio and every other mass media which has existed for almost 100 years.

Anyway the main culprit of this kind of stuff isn't actually Facebook or Twitter, it's Whatsapp, which has already been "responsible" for literally causing ethnic tensions in India, and has got in way more trouble with governments because stuff gets shared peer to peer and is much harder to trace when it goes viral.

Well I don't think that it's easy to pinpoint a single social media as source of the spread. They are not really self contained, QAnon started on 4chan and then spread everywhere. And only recently has social media been purposely used as a cyber warfare tool by some of the big players in the world (e.g., Russia, but not just Russia) at the global level.


I am not saying that Zuckerberg should go to prison over creating Facebook. I am saying that he and others they created an unwieldy monster without really understanding what they were doing, and now it's out of control and they are doing their best to just wash their hands off and keep raking in the money. There are some very fundamental differences between social media and traditional media such as those you mention. To start with, TV airs once and then it's gone forever. It is also much easier to control, given than not any random person can set up a tv show. And information shown on TV, as misleading and untruthful as it can get at times, usually has to pass a minimum standard of rationality before it's aired.

Most importantly though, and I really think that this is the main difference, information on TV is the same for everyone. We all have access to the same channels. Sure, usually people will stick to their favorites, but everything is available to them if they choose to watch them. And they choose what to watch. Facebook on the other hand selects for you what you are going to see. You don't pick the channel. If you click on that QAnon link once out of curiosity, you are going to get more of that. Twitter functions similarly. And it turns into a slippery slope where you see more and more of that garbage, until you end up living in a reality bubble where that garbage is the truth.

I do think 2020 was particularly bad for that because everyone was stuck at home with nothing to do.
 
QAnon started on 4chan and then spread everywhere.

All the ideas that QAnon is based on are copied almost directly from Fox News and people like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, which are themselves a melting pot of the pedo scare crisis of the 90s and Evangelical fearmongering in the Reagan era. It's easy to look at QAnon as a new thing, but this kind of "evangelical scare politics" have been a major faction in the republican voterbase for decades, however since it didn't have a name it didn't get the kind of unified media attention its getting now.

Facebook on the other hand selects for you what you are going to see. You don't pick the channel. If you click on that QAnon link once out of curiosity, you are going to get more of that. Twitter functions similarly. And it turns into a slippery slope where you see more and more of that garbage, until you end up living in a reality bubble where that garbage is the truth.

I think this is massively exaggerated and all the articles I've read are extremely vague about it. Twitter and Facebook echo chambers have developed almost organically as people from other sites or from irl create communities with each other. A suburban american boomer is unlikely to have many non-boomer friends on facebook. Insane Kpop weirdos from tumblr after the porn ban all arrived on twitter in one big lump and added each other. Libtarded bluetick journalists add each other. Tankies add each other. This has been the case since 2010 when I first joined and there was no algorithm. The algorithm definitely makes it more streamlined, but honestly in what world are these two accounts ever going to follow each other and interact meaningfully:



I do think Youtube does have this problem because it's more unilateral, but that site is a totally different beast, and the issues it had in around 2013-2018 with far right videos taking over the site have subsided with the perpetrators demonetised.
 
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But I felt that way before of Trump's ban, which was long overdue.
Trump getting banned is the scariest part, though. I mean, you have removed the president of the United States himself from a communication channel that has no alternatives at the moment without as much as an order from the Nowhereville county court (which lacking regulation makes impossible to seek, one needs to add).
 
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