They found out how gullable religion has made Americans. They will literally believe anything and fall in line like sheep.
"A Republican would eat a steaming bowl of shit if it meant a liberal had to smell their breath after"
Or just cuz Bonespurs said to. "Thank you, Daddy, may I have some more?!"
Just took em a second to figure out how.
Turns out all it took was algorithms promoting hate speech, conservative view points and other rage bait.
As soon as the algorithm become engagement based, instead of “positive reaction” based,
ie. algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative, when it used to promote posts based on positive reaction.
So now ragebait dominates most social media algorithms.
Yeah, it's precisely why I stopped using every social media except the fediverse. It was toxic to my mental health.
I feel safe assuming it's been similarly toxic to everyone else's, just some people haven't zeroed in on that being the problem.
Even Lemmy was like this. Especially with the default comment sort “active”, which promotes comments that lead to arguments. My experience has been better since I switched to “top”.
I still haven’t found a good post sort that works for me. “Hot” and “Scaled” literally only promote stuff posted in the past two hours. “Top” is kinda sad because you always see posts 1 day old, and “Active” has the negative engagement problem.
The best solution I’ve found is be on an instance with downvotes disabled and sort by “active” but it isn’t perfect.
I usually go by top of the last 6 hours and top of the last 12 hours. is that just a thing in my app?
algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative
ESPECIALLY if those reactions are negative. Rage and fear are THE top engagement drivers and engagement means retention means ad impressions means dollars.
That it also means the end of democracy is immaterial to the billionaire ghouls in charge, of course.
Yeah, how is that going in the Arab Springs countries though? Was that actually a glorious people's uprising, or just another despot using an angry mob to do his bidding?
People love to talk about how 'the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.'
It's easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it's really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
I do those things constantly and the fact that other people don’t infuriates me.
It’s like a group project and I’m doing my part but we still all fail because nobody else gives a damn.
I hate democracy and people now.
The quote is that the tree is "refreshed" with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we'd be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won't take even the simplest of actions until they're forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it's desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who "aren't really into politics," by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn't enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.
Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”
America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
We weren't vigilant. Quite the opposite, in fact.
There's a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don't pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictator
Maybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn't already doing the bidding of governments against people.
One could say the same about the Liberal Revolution of 1848. It failed, and yet it took many years before much of the liberal and progressive values became culturally ingrained.
"The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."- Martin Luther King Jr
Good or bad, that's why any ideas never die. That's why the powers-that-be love to censor.
The conclusion: as soon as a country is destabilized, you can bet your ass the US is going to come in and fuck up any democratic progress in their own favor.
Not only the US though.
Mostly the US. Even indirectly.
Tunesia is the only one with a success story where the mass protests were successful in creating reform (new president and constitution). In the other countries, the mass protests for reform were violently suppressed, and still are in the present day.
Summary of each country
What has happened since the so-called Arab Spring? Eight years later, human rights are under attack across the region. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, have been killed during armed conflicts that continue to rage in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The Syrian conflict has created the largest refugee crisis of the twenty-first century, humanitarian crisis.
Tunisia is the only relative success story. It has a new constitution, some justice for past crimes, but human rights are still under attack.
In Egypt, peaceful activists, critics of the government, and many others remain in jail. Torture and other ill treatment are rife. Hundreds have been sentenced to death and tens of thousands put behind bars for protesting or for their alleged links to political opposition. However, we saw that the current president was just authorized to stay in power until 2034.
In Bahrain, the authorities are silencing dissent.
Libya has turned into chaos. There are many armed conflicts all across the country, and all sides have committed war crimes and serious human rights abuses.
In Syria, the region’s bloodiest armed conflict emerged in response to the brutal suppression of mass protests by the government. Atrocious crimes are being committed on a massive scale. Half the population has been displaced.
Yemen is an ongoing tragedy, with a Saudi Arabia–led coalition (principally with the United Arab Emirates), but with the US supplying arms, providing refueling and intelligence, and so forth. Here’s an interesting Tucson connection. The Emirates just bought $1.6 billion of arms from Raytheon, so the Tucson economy stays strong. The Saudi Arabia–led coalition air strikes and shelling by Houthi forces have killed more than ten thousand civilians, forty thousand wounded. Ten million are now in jeopardy of famine and disease. Some of the attacks amount to war crimes.
The Arab Spring, which started out as an enormously hopeful movement for progressive change, has now largely been subjected to brutal repression and pushback from the forces of the status quo ante. It represents a poignant and tragic example of social struggle.
It gave women significantly more rights than they had before, but we all know that shit doesn't matter apparently.
How has it been weaponized against democracy?
It’s still the best way to get info not filtered by MSM. There’s a reason politicians in both parties are calling for increased social media censorship.
Its much more complicated than that, and yes contemporart information sources (i.e., the internet) have absolutely been weaponized by both state (Russia should come to mind) and non-state (say, ISIL, energy companies, etc) actors, as has been detailed in tens of thousands of pages of research and independent analysis focused on digital forensics. And its not just about the content (i.e., the ideological, cognitive apsects). It's also about control of the infrastructure - think media capture by oligarchs such as Musk or the reverse enginering of social media algorithms by countries like Russia to reach as many people as possible.
I would argue it's disingenuous to equate the activities of the two American parties in this field. If you were to take a comprehensive look at what they've been doing, there is a clear difference in their approach and intent. Where the Democratic Party wants to curtail the influence of foreign authoritarian states and local oligarchs by limiting their ability to spread disinformation, Republicans have been actively undermining these efforts, including by going after US agencies (such as the GEC) and independent researchers at NGOs. Why? Because these agencies and NGOs are exposing their lies and labeling their messages as misleading and dangerous. They are also exposing how aligned the Republics are with foreign authoritarian states.
Granted, I'm a bit biased. I'm one of those researchers. And dealing with SLAPPs and other measures by Republicans and their proxies has been undermining information integrity significantly in the last two years, within and without the US.
You’re absolutely biased, and spreading disinformation of your own. People in the US are much more likely to be subjected to disinformation and propaganda from their own government online than any foreign actor. It’s not even close- we’re being flooded with state propaganda from the US astroturfing farms, compared to a trickle from outside sources.
And it’s false to claim the Democrats are attempting to censor for our well-being. Whenever their activities are revealed in leaks or fulfilled FOIA requests, the vast majority is revealed to be censorship of criticism or dissent, or censoring anyone countering the state narrative. Truth and public good are not on the Dem priority list anymore than it’s on the Republicans’.
And worth noting, these censorship efforts are illegal. This is a crime spree.
It was never not being weaponized, and never stopped being a place to organize.
amazing how at the drop of a hat the mainstream media will shill for de-anonymizing trolls when someone makes fun of a corrupt politician
It's almost like They realized something...
Arab Autumn
Oh so you like the Internet eh?
Monetization of human weaknesses. By this I mean our biased, emotional, prone-to-addiction brains being colonized for data and ad-revenue.
We let the normies into our spaces.
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