Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
That’s a lot of words to just say “Allowing bad actors to lie about elections makes us money, while hiring the staff to combat election lies costs us money, and we’re too sociopathic to spend money for the good of the country.”
Just like Musk and the other billionaires wanted.
Delete Facebook, Twitter (x 🙄), insta, and Reddit.
I just realized now that Reddit’s gone, I don’t have any of those. Which is good, because I think all the usual social media are going to become steadily more unbearable the closer we get to US elections.
I actually took several week breaks from Reddit the last couple of election years, and because I used to open up each thread in a separate tab, as soon as a thread devolved into politics and took the predictable turn into trolls/bots/shills I just closed the tab and moved on to the next. But given the changes in just the last three years on Reddit alone, even that wouldn’t be enough.
I think I got out just in time. For my own sanity, anyway. There is just no upside that I can think of to letting my brain be exposed to that level of mindfuckery and propagandistic delivery tactics day in and day out anymore, so I shamelessly avoid as much of the contentious political shit as I can. I highly recommend it, lol.
Why do we want social media companies to be the arbiters of truth anyway…
Because like it or not that is where a lot of people get information these days. If it keeps pushing bulshit, people believe bulshit. For an example, anti-vaxxers didn’t use to be so common, until their bulshit was spread all over social media.
I would love for people to be wise enough to verify information in reliable sources and not just believe everything they see, but sadly that’s not the world where we live in.
Antivax sentiment has been around for hundreds of years, long before the Internet, mostly through political party rhetoric and/or religion, not saying the spread likely hasn’t increased, but people believe wrong information all the time.
There is always a nutball, but my point is that, yes, it has increased significantly. Vaccines were a settled matter already, people far and wide trusted them. Now vaccination rates have gone down and diseases that we had nearly eliminated are having a comeback. This has happened because now any stupid grifter can have a worldwide platform and a following who actively spreads their nonsense.
Need to regulate them severly. Too bad the capitalists have captured the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.
I always wonder what form people imagine this regulation taking. One of my least favorite ideas is YouTube recommendations.
He’s a cancer on the human race as a whole.
Edit: sorry I’m not sure what happened , it worked when I posted. Working link posted below (thanks @chunkMcHorkle)
~~Got paywall on main link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230825070213/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/25/political-conspiracies-facebook-youtube-elon-musk/~~
This one works for me.
They know our government effectively has schizophrenia. Trouble is they’re fucked in the long run whether it’s Jekyll or Hyde.
This was the plan all along. Musk spends his handler’s money to buy Twitter, and he makes it unpalatable to the liberal users by fucking it up. Then he removes the ability to block users, reinstates Donald Trump, and then Trump and his followers use it as a platform to build momentum for his reelection. This is important enough to Trump’s handlers to be worth 44 billion dollars.
Musk went along because they have dirt on him. Life-ruining dirt. The entire GOP is kept in line by the people in the shadows collecting and manufacturing dirt on everyone. It’s like having an entire oligarchy of Kingpins, except it’s totally real.
They suck in and trap pedophiles, rapists, embezzlers, hackers, deeply closeted homosexuals, and anyone they can lure into commiting a crime while their cameras roll. (Or what their constituents see as abhorrent behavior).
Some of the GOP relish in it, and some hate it but are trapped. It’s a mixed bag, but they all serve the people in the shadows trying to take control of the US.
If anyone gets caught doing one of these crimes, it gets swept under the rug or they simply get thrown to the wolves while publicly disavowing the person.
It’s exactly as evil as what Putin does except a lot less obvious to the public who is doing it. However, everyone with any tenure in the GOP knows exactly what’s up and who’s in charge. It’s half cult and half trapped losers.
While I don’t necessarily disagree, who do you think is in the shadows? I’ve always said that Reagan being an actor with Alzheimer was a pro, not a con, to the GOP, but I’ve never subscribed to shadow order conspiracies. Do we have proof that there are puppet master and whom they might be?