Ok so idk if this is the most appropriate place to post this, but are the extreme views and statement we see on these platforms really just “bots” and “internet noise” are these genuinely the worst parts of humanity?
For context/elaborating on it, I kinda drifted off from lemmy to reddit due to lack of content here and holee fuck, its just horrifying, the amount of pro genocidal statements and cheers for extremism genuinely makes me feel at extreme unease, but it also makes me ask a question. I come from a conservative southasian society and whenever you bring up topics like treatment of minorities, lgbtq+ rights, feminism etc, people normally dont comment on this stuff or make a “harmless joke” out of it, but seeing reddit pages of the same grp of ppl it makes me genuinely feel that these guys hold on to genuinely insane beliefs, and are just afraid to present it to anyone in person…
In order to be civil, thoughtful, and graceful, a person needs to reflect and understand complexity. The platforms of the internet incentivise the opposite. Extremity is louder than resonability so it floats to the top of the discourse.
Additionally, seeing 100, 1,000 or 10,000 people on a platform, from around the world, express shocking or anti-social viewpoints represents an infinitely small sub section of the population. A group that includes provacateurs, bots, nation-state actors, and wing-nuts.
The real trouble comes from others who aren’t taking time to reflect, who see this content every day and begin to believe that it must be valid because they keep seeing it. Slowly they twist and adopt pieces of rhetoric because there isn’t enough of a counter balance of opposing views sharing the same weight in their feeds.
Hmm, yeah ig it maybe a fair possibility that most are just agnostic, and get influenced by opinions that are propagated by a ridiculous amount of funding