It's an interesting illustration of how news travels around the internet and a single story gets covered multiple times, making it seem bigger than it is. It's not new and it's how social media amplifies certain narratives and how people become trapped in propaganda loops. I'm not saying this specific story is propaganda, I'm talking about how news travels around the internet in general.

It travels between sites in a loop. Twitter to reddit, reddit to hexbear. Or directly from twitter to hexbear. It's cyclical in time. A story gets posted, people digest and move on. It comes back around after traveling the loop, now the story is fresh again and seems like a new instance of the same event. News also gets digested and regurgitated. An initial story happens, gets posted and discussed. Then a news outlet in need of content writes a story about the reaction to the story. This makes the event seem like it's happening again or constantly.

All this adds up to people thinking one event happens multiple times and often. This is why crime reporting is so effective in detaching people from understanding real risk. Even if we understand all this, we're not immune to it. For all of our criticism and media awareness, we still fall into these traps.

[–] spectre@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago

Great points. My vision for our community would be that we discuss this exact phenomenon more often and even try and innoculate our community from that effect. We could even position ourselves in the media ecosystem and make ourselves relevant. I don't even think we can do that at the scale of the Lemmyverse anymore.

I want to be part of a community that has a higher level of self awareness. I'd like to do that outside of the bigtech ecosystem. Having a Lemmy instance is cool beans, so I'm frustrated that it is likely going to slip away.