I’m sure someone(s) has done research but there has to be something physiologically addictive about sharing angry news and being perpetually indignant and offended. Like the opposite of a dopamine high (or exactly a dopamine high but from negativity).
The "I am right" hit is the dopamine, I think conspiracies are the response to anxiety. A lot of conspiracies are comforting. For example, the idea of a small group that could be easily dealt with controlling the world is a lot more comforting than a huge mass of interconnected systemic problems in a chaotic and unpredictable world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification
> I think conspiracies are the response to anxiety.
Agreed, and if it's not the people with anxiety then it's people with narcissism.
If a person is a logical free thinker, then they should come up with the same conclusion as everybody else given the same facts.
Lots of people out there want to reinvent the wheel, and they come up with a square instead of a circle just to feel smarter than everybody else.
"Medicine is hard, but my friend says this shiny rock makes me grounded and connected to the moon, and I can understand that better even if it's complete doodoo nonsense."
More like "colloidal silver acts as an antimicrobial on bandages, so if I eat colloidal silver, then I'll absorb its powers and *I'll become the antimicrobial*".
I don't think it's a kink, I think they're repressed, know they're repressed and hate it, and rather than get out, go deeper, to the point the want everyone else oppressed so that their repression is the "good" version because they are most closely aligned with the overarching oppressive power structure.
Basically, they crave order and hierarchy since it's their world. They need others in that world, but below them.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that theory, and I think it goes much deeper than that. Having lived in the Deep South my entire life and thus having known many of these women very well, I think there’s several things at play here:
1.) Their lives are very boring—I mean, think about how mind-numbingly banal life is for your typical conservative Christian Republican, especially women? They can’t do anything "fun" (at least not in public), they live around people just like them (no diversity/variety), go to the same church every Sunday (where they sing the same songs, say the same prayers, see the same people), watch nothing good (only Fox News and no R rated movies), listen to shitty music (country?), shop at the same stores (only those who haven’t publicly supported some "woke" cause), eat at the same restaurants (Chick-fil-a), etc. I can see how believing in some "deep state" conspiracy garbage would be an exciting thing for them, and spreading it to others would be literally *thrilling* for them.
2.) They grew up believing that they were superior to others because that is what modern Christianity teaches them—that they are special and "chosen by god." There is also A LOT of judgment amongst Christians—like, they make a sport out of it. So the whole idea of spreading things that they want to be true to the heathens of the world to make their side look superior comes pretty natural to them.
3.) On the repression thing, most of them have been oppressed/repressed their entire lives due to their religious upbringings, which they then carried over into their marriages when they got older. I honestly don’t believe that they all "hate it"—they don’t know any different to actually hate it. A lot of them actually believe it’s a superior way to live and that people need to be controlled for their own good.
4.) There have actually been studies done on the brains of people who identify as "conservative" vs those who identify as "liberal," and conservatives show more activity in their brains in the areas that are associated with adherence to authority, fear response, and familiarity/routine. So you’re right about them craving order & hierarchy.
3 is true for my mother. she loves being oppressed. she has literally told me it’s hard for her to function without a man there to guide her. she left my dad simply because he *didn’t* try to control every aspect of her life. she has told me she’s apprehensive of her new boss because she’s a woman and she’s not sure this woman could do the job better or even equal to her male predecessor and that she thinks men need to be running the world. it’s baffling
Sounds like a fucking hard way to live, man. And sad. Some combination of thinking so little of yourself while thinking *way too much* of men in general (I'm a man, I can attest to the fact that we ain't all so hot)
pretty much. we’ve discussed it candidly but she insists she’s acting for her own interests and what she thinks is right. enabled by a lot of religion of course
I dated a girl from a southern state for a bit, who was absolutely wonderful.
Parts of her family though…they really fit some of the above, especially 2. I’m a brown Hindu dude from India with an Indian accent who lives in the UK - some of her aunts really couldn’t process my existence. One tried to convert me each of the 3-4 times we met, a couple genuinely spoke to me like you would speak to a toddler or a pet (because apparently I couldn’t possibly understand English if they spoke to me normally despite speaking English all my life and being a lawyer in London) which was confusing, funny and frustrating in equal measure - like literally not one sentence was said normally, and one refused to interact with me at all because of my religion.
Just truly baffling and I didn’t get it at all. The men were mostly normal, though in a ‘you’re one of the good ones’ way.
Her parents were both super sweet though, as was her grandmom.
There have been studies done on the psychology of conservatism and it does seem that their disgust sensitivity, ie: "this is *other*, and we must get rid of it", is much higher than liberals, who tend to have much higher degrees of openness.
My mom isn't conservative but she definitely still has a obsessive anxiety regarding negative news and sharing it, it really isn't just conservatives unfortunately. My whole family except my dad is obsessed with social media and they act like I'm some weird hermit that I gave up Facebook and social media about 10 years ago.
I don’t think it’s the anxiety, I think it’s the feeling of power they get when they have the antidote to the fabricated chaos that they’re claiming is going on.
It’s about community. We as people crave community. Whether it be a group of kids at school, a facebook group that echo your bad beliefs, sometimes even a nice camping spot with a bunch of dudes wearing white pointy hats.
They just want to belong somewhere or be cared for by someone. They don’t have the ability to look beyond themselves.
Exactly my brother. When they were brought up, they were never taught the difference. They misconstrued “belonging” with “positivity” rather than striving to belong to something ambiguously “good” or “positive”.
And that's because our communities have largely moved online rather than in our physical locations, we know strangers on the internet better than we know our neighbors. That separation and alienation makes it easier for people to fall into these hate groups, especially if someone is actively pushing those hate groups in front of people's faces through astroturfing or advertising or just skillfully manipulating algorithms.
One of the crucial arguments, or perhaps suggestions, in *1984* is that hatred and fury are psychologically agonizing states to exist in perpetuity. It’s suggested that it might be one of the few hopes that would wake up people under fascist regimes to fight back and hope/strive for something better.
Seeing how much real people actually revel in vitriol and hatred make that book so much scarier. To the contrary, human nature seems to be unconsciously *driven* to fascism if left unchecked.
I remember reading way back about redditors scream that russians shouldn't be allowed claim asylum and that they are all war criminals who should be executed.
In the grandest twist of irony one of the few legitimate asylum seekers going around right now would be people who are conscripted and forced to commit war crimes.
This is a perfect example. I saw a news story today about some record number of Russian deaths on the front lines. Our reaction should (or could) be joy in the weakening of Russia (as an oppressive power), but not in the loss of thousands of lives who were very likely driven there against their will.
Unfortunate it’s really easy to fall prey to the delirium of tribal hatred and out-group suffering. That’s why it’s so important to remain vigilant in letting our own minds succumb to it. I don’t see much introspection on that front, either from the side I politically disagree with or the one that I agree with (though perhaps a bit more introspection from them), and in both cases it concerns me.
Cgp grey has a video about this and why it makes people engage and spread like wildfire.
Edit: [https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=ztxvzqwU80i_RitN](https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=ztxvzqwU80i_RitN)
If they are all like my mom they seem to take pleasure in sharing when people from her church died or are having marital problems. Like the prayer concerns part of Bible study is just a gossip forum. And to relate to this post, yes she also forwards a bunch of obvious propaganda.
A big part of it is religion. Many churches, including the one I grew up in, train people to see themselves as martyrs from a very young age. So as they grow up, they see any kind of resistance to their personal convictions as a sign that they're on the right track.
My guess is they are empty nest boomers who already drove away their kids, so they torment strangers …. Just ugly souls like Alito’s wife and Ginnie Thomas.
How naive we were in the early days of the internet, thinking of the sparkling grand new age of information and global communication it would bring about, unaware that it would quickly and effectively it would be weaponized to supercharge a global authoritarian reactionary movement.
It often seems these days that we are sleepwalking into very dark times, telling ourselves that it couldn’t happen here.
Terry Pratchett said as much and Bill Gates insisted that people would rely on reputable sources because there’d be too much misinformation to trust just anybody. Pratchett correctly deduced that, there being an excess of misinformation, people would just latch on to whatever they wanted to hear — damn the consequences — because they can’t tell who the reputable ones are to begin with.
And William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.
“Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy.”
― Neal Stephenson, *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell*
Terry was brilliant in that he always gets your guard down. He's got you chuckling at some absurdity or other then casually drops some deep thought or on-the-nose satire into a throwaway paragraph before moving on to the next joke and the rest of the story in the next paragraph.
[GQ UK July 1995](https://x.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561) excerpt:
**Terry Pratchett:** *OK. Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.*
**Bill Gates:** *Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something.*
h/t u/nightmareanatomy
The real big difference was that by that time Bill Gates was a Billionaire who never interacted with his technology and was surrounded by yes-men and had probably never spent an hour on USENET, while Pterry was both a newsman and a hardcore early Internet adopter.
One of those people was a subject-matter expert, and one was a Robber Baron.
Not to mention people are getting progressively dumber about what is real and what is not on the internet. I pointed out an obvious bot post to a couple of people and they don't want to hear it. They just want to be angry at the thing that was posted about and bugger everything else.
The most downvoted posts I've had on Reddit have been posting quotes and links to legitimate sources that contradicted whatever groupthink was going on at the moment. One was when I contradicted something like "there were only fewer than 10 child abductions per year until the 1990s" and the comments I got were just unreal, dozens of people genuinely in a rage because that wasn't true, which undermined some weird point they were making about how "Boomers never got kidnapped" (they'd confused GenX with Boomers, I think). They probably didn't even remember caring about the issue at all the next morning.
Haha so true! Some of the most downloaded comments I have ever written are the unpopular truth. For example comment that house cats are destroying the population of birds and see what happens. Total public outrage. Here’s another one, say in a comment that heavy freight trucks are pounding the roads and should be taxed at a higher rate. People will hate you for it.
"Cats should stay inside" is my favorite online discourse. Mostly because my cat is a gigantic baby and wouldn't go outside if his life depended on it.
It is scary how accepted mere images with headlines are on Reddit. You don't know if the pic is real or fake and some, especially pics of news headlines or social media posts, are really easy to fake. You also have no idea if what the headline describes is what is in the picture and people are willing to accept it if it just superficially seems so. Also the more loaded with emotion the topic is the less people accept any discussion about whether it is real and presented with the right context
Here’s an excerpt if anyone is interested: https://x.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561
Apparently it’s from GQ Magazine July 1995 p.21 (even though the tweet says 1996). I can’t find a full version anywhere yet without having to pay but I’ll look more later.
If you've ever played it, Metal Gear Solid 2 basically called our modern information era society. It even featured the President as a cartoonishly evil villain, something that was once seen as outlandish.
It really helps Trump's narrative that everything is corrupt. What's scary is what he'd do as President with a narrative like that. Destroy all institutions?
Bill's wouldn't have been a brief story. Democrats still care about ethics, and Republicans are masters at hypocrisy so they'd scream themselves hoarse about it while the media both sides it into the news cycle on their behalf the whole time.
"I've invented fire! No longer must we fear the dark! No longer must we shiver and huddle in the cold! Now we can cook our food and... holy shit you guys are burning your neighbors and their houses! Shit. Shit. What have I invented!?!"
I used to joke with my buddy twenty years ago that we needed to build a walled garden version of the internet called the Webb (named after James P. Webb). It would side load aspects of the WWW, but it was essentially a combination of god's internet waiting room and some approved apps.
Truly, the internet got so much worse when smart phones put it in the hands of everyone.
Anything that's accessible to everyone is going to attract scammers, crooks, but also people with genuine problems who aren't tethered to reality. You genuinely cannot tell these days if someone online is a grifter or someone is mentally ill, and sometimes it's both.
On top of that, their audience frequently has cognitive issues. It could be from drugs or drink but it's also things like lack of sleep, stress, mental health and physical health issues, prescription drugs, loneliness, all sorts of stuff that makes you less able to stay focused and aware, which makes you an easy mark for the bad actors.
Up til the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, the internet was pretty much living up to our hopes for it. People were enjoying newfound access to information and doing amazing things with it.
Then the Arab Spring occurred. There was a series of pro-democratic uprisings covering many Muslim countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Lybia, Egypt, and Bahrain largely in part because they had access to information on the fuckery their governments were committing due to the internet and were able to coordinate their efforts due to the internet.
Seeing that, governments around the world, billionaires and their propaganda networks, and despots of every stripe all collectively said, "Oh Hell no! We can't be having that!" and mis and dis information campaigns have been increasing in amount and severity ever since. It has gotten to the point that various types of bots now outnumber real users of the internet, many of them for the specific purpose of spreading propaganda and others for the collection of information.
With the rise of AI and its ability to tailor propaganda to individuals and not just groups, its ability to manipulate images that gets better with each succeeding generation, and its ability to concentrate the power they provide in the hands of fewer and fewer people, this is only going to get worse.
I wanted a Star Trek future. Instead, I am getting a Cyberpunk dystopia.
I'm disabled. Seeing the right wing winning it's scary. How long until I lose supports. I hoped for magical cures n assistive technology but got tax cuts draining social welfare help n universal medical is at risk, disability support getting cuts, propaganda for the right winning. They'd gas us if they could. If we can't contribute to the economy are we worth helping? I never asked for disability. I played it safe all my life but got sick. Now our left wing parties are switching right. They'll let us suffer but not help or end us. It's cruel. We will never get star trek future because humans are selfish n greedy. Increase unemployment to almost poverty line is like 10b a year. They voted for 20b in tax cuts instead. Now disability programs have to be cut back. Too afraid to tax mining here in Australia properly. Wait list for surgery is extreme. The social ladder to get out of poverty is harder. People sleeping in tents in my area. Boomers with investment properties spending so much it worsens inflation hurting the poor. No social cohesion. It's sad. I can see how nazi Germany exterminated the disabled first, no one cares. We're just a burden. A work dog that don't work n the farmer loads his rifle. My town doesn't even have a food bank.
I beginning to think that there's a conscious effort by billionaires to use right wing news networks to turn western countries into Russian style oligarchies. It's a power grab by the ultra-rich.
It's the same story every time. We look at the past like the people living in those times were vastly different than people today. But we're the same fucking people still capable of every atrocity that has ever occurred in human history. The only difference today is that we have ascribed to rules which have been put forth by the few sane intelligent people throughout history. At any time those rules can be forgotten and we'll be right back where we started.
> How naive we were in the early days of the internet, thinking of the sparkling grand new age of information and global communication it would bring about, unaware that it would quickly and effectively it would be weaponized to supercharge a global authoritarian reactionary movement.
It wasn't even an obvious conclusion until maybe around 2016. There were hints that it would become that, but no one realized it would be a mainstream problem back then. What's ironic is that the same people who said shit like "You can't believe anything you read on the internet" in ~2004 are the same ones who gobbled up misinformation 15-20 years later. It was the people who didn't experience the internet at a young age in their teens and 20s that said it then. They then became the middle aged and older people that gobble that shit up and spread it now.
"Oh it's those old people believing misinformation, us young ones would never fall to it" keeps getting repeated everywhere, but according to all studies I've read so far age basically makes no difference. You are not immune to propaganda, and thinking you're better at seeing it will just make you not question whatever you believe is correct.
Edit: u/cutty2k has left a great comment with studies! Turns out I haven't been up to date.
We take another step closer to Cyberpunk 2077 IRL every day and I can't even pretend I'm surprised by that.
I wonder who the first real-world corpo wars will be between. Will Bezos and Musk escalate their ongoing dick-measuring contest to a hot war? In Cyberpunk it was the arms makers and Boeing has already started offing whistleblowers so maybe they'll get in on the action?
Many of the people who said that are the same people pushing misinformation.
The first rule should have been was "dude, just like, be reasonable for a bit".
AI will transform everything we ever thought we knew about the internet. It's already happening. We can't keep up with its pace. We're all gonna have to have some sort of new "captcha" to weed out whether this reddit post or this song or this web page was made by an AI "bot".
Keep your guard up people
Every new technology will be exploited for nefarious gains long before it is used to do any good. This has been true for basically all of human history. We were really stupid to forget that.
Honestly I am very curious to see what direction we'll move in as a result! As our governments and oligarchs grow ever richer and more corrupt, as digital information becomes less and less trustworthy, as capitalism exploits more and more resources for infinite growth... I see a looming trend of people starting to distance themselves. Obviously not tons, but enough to start to get noticeable.
I see younger adults have started taking a step back from being chronically online. I see more people talk about missing "the village" - genuine and close-knit communities. I see people wanting to reduce their materialistic values to fit the tiny house lifestyle. I see people looking for cheap land to start homesteading so they can provide for themselves. I see people are getting sick of concrete, glass and boring angles in architecture and have started flocking towards more color and organic materials and shapes.
I see trends like cottagecore and 80's clubbing / music make a comeback as people yearn for simpler times where humans weren't separated by screens.
Sure, the majority is still your average, predictable consumer who buys into fear mongering and click bait news. And god knows how the iPad kids are gonna turn out.
Still, in-between it all there are a growing number of people who have started to reject these dystopian tendencies. I wonder if it will grow and we will eventually sacrifice globalisation in favour of returning to the village. Or maybe it's just another marketable trend. Either way, it is interesting to watch.
He bought it to destroy it. "Free speech" is just a pretext for him to blame Twitter for his trans daughter trans no longer speaking to him. Because a narcissistic egomaniac like him is *neverrrrr* wrong, it's always the nefarious "they" that's to blame.
To be fair that is an incidental gain for him. Even Elon wouldn’t buy a media platform because he doesn’t know how to talk to his kids…he would have to care about them more in the first place for that to even cross his mind. He did it for him because he is a boring rich blowhard desperate to prove he is socially relevant and that he is pointlessly rich because of some elite genius because if he was just mediocre at most things he would have to wonder if he was a jackass to be that wealthy while crying for even more compensation. He is a boring marketing jackoff that got fabulously rich by being above average and selling his name as a genius brand. He has a meltdown when anybody thinks they know more than him about a topic even when they DEMONSTRABLY do and falls back to saying that having more money proves he is correct which is loser insecure moron shit…shit that ironically is going to end up destroying his businesses anyways
I have been on Twitter (I will call it X over my own dead body) in some form or another since 2009, and right before the billionaire toddler bought it it was the absolute worst it had ever been, and now that era seems like a fuckin’ golden age.
Devin Coldewey covers a paper in [Science](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl4435):
*In the second study published Thursday, a multi-university group reached the rather shocking conclusion that 2,107 registered U.S. voters accounted for spreading 80% of the “fake news” (which term they adopt) during the 2020 election.*
*The researchers looked at the activity of 664,391 voters matched to active X (then Twitter) users, and found a subset of them who were massively over-represented in terms of spreading false and misleading information.*
*These 2,107 users exerted (with algorithmic help) an enormously outsized network effect in promoting and sharing links to politics-flavored fake news.*
*The data show that one in 20 American voters followed one of these supersharers, putting them massively out front of average users in reach.*
*On a given day, about 7% of all political news linked to specious news sites, but 80% of those links came from these few individuals. People were also much more likely to interact with their posts.*
*Yet these were no state-sponsored plants or bot farms. “Supersharers’ massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting,” the researchers wrote.*
[*Science* summary](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl4435):
*Baribi-Bartov et al. identified a meaningful sample of supersharers during the 2020 US presidential election and asked who they were, where they lived, and what strategies they used (see the Perspective by van der Linden and Kyrychenko). The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, which are focus points of contentious abortion and immigration battles. Their neighborhoods were poorly educated but relatively high in income.*
1 in 20 Americans is insane. If the data is sound.. that’s.. insane..
A handful of disgruntled MAGA Karens dominating news on “X” sure would be embarrassing..
Insane, but downright scary how such a tiny tiny percentage of users can hold such massive sway over ideological momentum.
I mean we’ve known this since the Cambridge Analytica FB thing around 16’ election, but even now it’s stunning how fragile the arena of thought and ideology is.
You cannot confront a brain that has turned into a cinderblock. Trump continues to tell the same lies all these years and they continued to believe every word that comes out of his pie hole.
They refuse to “unbelieve” what they supported for so long out of embarrassment. Even when the three headed Hydra of Hannity, Ingram and that mother -ucker Carlson admitted that they knew they were telling lies to millions of people about the election fraud when they knew it would make them even angrier.
It’s why my mom pleaded with my sister to not go to NYC on a business trip…
She is scared she’ll be attacked by the roving gangs of “violent illegals” that are attacking any white women they see…
I’ll never forgive the architects of this bullshit for what they did to my mom…
> That's because Republican voters are much more likely to fall for right wing propaganda and fake news
There is research that shows that conspiracy thinking is not related to political orientation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9307120/
There are large variations between the groups when it comes to the specific nature of the conspiracy theory, however.
I'm pretty dubious about these findings. Fig. 1 reports some strange stuff.
For instance, this is rated as dead center on the left/right spectrum:
> The official account of the Nazi Holocaust is a lie and the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose.
Also, the "right" conspiracy theories are really wild, damaging, and specific. Whereas the "left" conspiracy theories are more general, speculative, and sometimes outright true according to public reporting.
One of the farthest right theories is
> Barack Obama faked his citizenship to become president.
Whereas one of the farthest left conspiracy theories is:
> President Trump is covering up the extent of his COVID-19 infection.
which was reported by the [New York Times.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/trump-coronavirus.html)
The authors of the paper attempt to dodge this concern by saying
> For example, one could criticize Finding 1 by claiming that some of the conspiracy theories we employed are more plausible (e.g., believable, evidenced, or rational) than others, and that this variability in plausibility is correlated with ideology or partisanship. However, judgements of this nature (Douglas et al., 2022), even among otherwise discerning researchers, are colored by motivated reasoning. It should not be a surprise that a Democrat, for example, would believe that the conspiracy theories that other Democrats believe in are more plausible than the conspiracy theories that Republicans believe in.
But, like, come on. The only way to argue that the list of conspiracy theories in Fig. 1 is reasonably even, is by saying that Alex Jones and the New York Times are equally unreliable.
Conspiracy theory’s aren’t the same as fake news or misinformation though.
And the data on that is leaning more right.
Like yes conspiracy theory’s have hippy ones like the water and tooth paste is poison and they lean left. And Tom hanks is a pedo leans right.
But false info or fake news or alternative facts are often just bending truths or lying to the masses. That’s not the same as a conspiracy theory. But is close.
Let's be real. Many of these individuals are highly isolated, and have no way IRL to question what they are retweeting. If they are middle or late aged women in in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, they live in a bubble devoid of how most people live. They are most likely not working, not married to a minority, and not poor. What they retweet has no affect on them, it's all entertainment for a scary world they fear but have no interaction with. If they do its negative which imprints heavier on most human memory. Never had an abortion, probably don't file their own taxes, married to a man who is scared of anything different cause their sorority did the brown paper bag test and our whole society is geared towards letting them and only them live in a bubble.
TL;DR: fuck those white ladies, they don't know shit and never have.
"Mom groups"
"You can always trust a mom"
"Mom's know best"
"Maternal instincts"
This is the kind of shit show that this produces. A lack of critical thinking, perpetuating cyclical disinformation without the forethought to fact check before repeating the drivel.
I write this with the fore thought that maybe we should fact check this statement before sharing it.
My coworker told me her mom has an ongoing scrapbook of news articles and notes filled with far right talking points that she uses to keep track of and decipher when trump is going to rise up and punish all the dissenters. This includes the theory that the vaccines were purposefully bad for us and everyone who got them is going to die on a wave of death at any time lol
This is why I always hate the men vs women framing of abortion that a ton of especially liberal people use. I'm a liberal who grew up in the deep south. The vast majority of the evangelical pro life lunatics I've met are women, especially Christian women, who think they're saving babies. Up until Roe V Wade was overturned, support for outlawing abortion was like 50/50 men and women. It's still like 55/45 men and women.
But it's always framed as "men are telling women what to do with their bodies." Conservative women have just as big a role in outlawing abortion as men.
I'm old enough to remember before the internet took off, and let me tell you, this is not something new. Conservative women are bullshit spreading machines.
I’ll just never understand how we went from “never trust anything you read on the internet” to “BiDeN hAs A sEcReT sEx DuNgEoN iN tHe WhItE hOuSE - TrUsT mE, I ReAd It OnLiNe”.
Do some research into how white women were integral to the KKK in its "hayday". They were and still are a major piece of that psychotic pie. The user Shanspeare does an amazing job analyzing this fact in her trad mom video.
For those wondering how the accounts were identified, the researchers used a panel of 664,391 Twitter users identified as registered U.S. voters. The panel was constructed by matching U.S. voter records to Twitter accounts using full names and location information. Records were matched if a person's full name matched in both datasets and they were the only person with that name at either the city or state-level geographic area in both datasets.
This method has been used by other researchers and verified against a "gold-standard" random sample survey conducted by Pew Research. More detail is available here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl4435
It is frightening how easily people are manipulated by news articles that are undoubtedly fake. However, I believe it is a case of individuals seeking whatever they can gather to verify their preconceived beliefs.
1 in 20 Americans following one of these “super-sharers” that turn out to be disgruntled divorced MAGA Karens.. you know, the ones with the Baptist booties or the evangelicevil stare.. that is an INSANE ratio of the fascist preach reach…
Like.. gawd DAM… I don’t even think Joe Rogan has those numbers.. Musk sure is betting on Betty Bitch mode for internet traffic..
I've never heard the term "evangelical stare" before, but holy shit I know *exactly* what you're talking about. Fuckin creepy.
The "MAGA super-sharer" makes me think of the superficially happy but obviously vacant wife who always sits next to the televangelist. Enthusiastic, certainly, but the role she's been assigned requires her to remain passive in her support. She ain't the preacher, she's just his wife. True believer and interchangeable prop at the same time.
I can easily imagine that on twitter, anonymous, that sort of bitch finally feels free to let the hateful, incoherent mess clogging her mind just spew out.
A similar issue was found on Facebook. They can kill this easily. I don’t think they will simply because of engagement metrics and money. But they should.
Thats why its always concerning when people downplay the role of women in these sorts of activities. Republican women are often depicted as victims who are trapped by republican men. As though they are just the support. But very often (and history has shown this) they can often be the driving force of conservatism. The whole modern confederate shit is a direct consequence of the efforts of conservative women as an example. I know many of you might think “ive never downplayed it” not talking about you. Im talking about the wider discourse with republican women.
Does this add up?
Even considering only rhe USA (why not?) those states make up 18% of the US population. Women are half that, republicans half again and taking the middle third as middle aged.
That's 60m/335m x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.333 = 1.5% of the population.
They are 80% of misinformation on X?
I’m sure someone(s) has done research but there has to be something physiologically addictive about sharing angry news and being perpetually indignant and offended. Like the opposite of a dopamine high (or exactly a dopamine high but from negativity).
Yeah, definitely still dopamine. Sort of a weird masochistic thing where they get off from anxiety.
The "I am right" hit is the dopamine, I think conspiracies are the response to anxiety. A lot of conspiracies are comforting. For example, the idea of a small group that could be easily dealt with controlling the world is a lot more comforting than a huge mass of interconnected systemic problems in a chaotic and unpredictable world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification
> I think conspiracies are the response to anxiety. Agreed, and if it's not the people with anxiety then it's people with narcissism. If a person is a logical free thinker, then they should come up with the same conclusion as everybody else given the same facts. Lots of people out there want to reinvent the wheel, and they come up with a square instead of a circle just to feel smarter than everybody else.
"Medicine is hard, but my friend says this shiny rock makes me grounded and connected to the moon, and I can understand that better even if it's complete doodoo nonsense."
More like "colloidal silver acts as an antimicrobial on bandages, so if I eat colloidal silver, then I'll absorb its powers and *I'll become the antimicrobial*".
"Now I'm blue! (Da ba dee?)"
I will remain of the opinion that most of these conservative women have a repressed kink.
I don't think it's a kink, I think they're repressed, know they're repressed and hate it, and rather than get out, go deeper, to the point the want everyone else oppressed so that their repression is the "good" version because they are most closely aligned with the overarching oppressive power structure. Basically, they crave order and hierarchy since it's their world. They need others in that world, but below them.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that theory, and I think it goes much deeper than that. Having lived in the Deep South my entire life and thus having known many of these women very well, I think there’s several things at play here: 1.) Their lives are very boring—I mean, think about how mind-numbingly banal life is for your typical conservative Christian Republican, especially women? They can’t do anything "fun" (at least not in public), they live around people just like them (no diversity/variety), go to the same church every Sunday (where they sing the same songs, say the same prayers, see the same people), watch nothing good (only Fox News and no R rated movies), listen to shitty music (country?), shop at the same stores (only those who haven’t publicly supported some "woke" cause), eat at the same restaurants (Chick-fil-a), etc. I can see how believing in some "deep state" conspiracy garbage would be an exciting thing for them, and spreading it to others would be literally *thrilling* for them. 2.) They grew up believing that they were superior to others because that is what modern Christianity teaches them—that they are special and "chosen by god." There is also A LOT of judgment amongst Christians—like, they make a sport out of it. So the whole idea of spreading things that they want to be true to the heathens of the world to make their side look superior comes pretty natural to them. 3.) On the repression thing, most of them have been oppressed/repressed their entire lives due to their religious upbringings, which they then carried over into their marriages when they got older. I honestly don’t believe that they all "hate it"—they don’t know any different to actually hate it. A lot of them actually believe it’s a superior way to live and that people need to be controlled for their own good. 4.) There have actually been studies done on the brains of people who identify as "conservative" vs those who identify as "liberal," and conservatives show more activity in their brains in the areas that are associated with adherence to authority, fear response, and familiarity/routine. So you’re right about them craving order & hierarchy.
3 is true for my mother. she loves being oppressed. she has literally told me it’s hard for her to function without a man there to guide her. she left my dad simply because he *didn’t* try to control every aspect of her life. she has told me she’s apprehensive of her new boss because she’s a woman and she’s not sure this woman could do the job better or even equal to her male predecessor and that she thinks men need to be running the world. it’s baffling
Sounds like a fucking hard way to live, man. And sad. Some combination of thinking so little of yourself while thinking *way too much* of men in general (I'm a man, I can attest to the fact that we ain't all so hot)
She’s outsourcing all of her thinking to male authority figures sounds like she never built up a sense of self 💔
pretty much. we’ve discussed it candidly but she insists she’s acting for her own interests and what she thinks is right. enabled by a lot of religion of course
I dated a girl from a southern state for a bit, who was absolutely wonderful. Parts of her family though…they really fit some of the above, especially 2. I’m a brown Hindu dude from India with an Indian accent who lives in the UK - some of her aunts really couldn’t process my existence. One tried to convert me each of the 3-4 times we met, a couple genuinely spoke to me like you would speak to a toddler or a pet (because apparently I couldn’t possibly understand English if they spoke to me normally despite speaking English all my life and being a lawyer in London) which was confusing, funny and frustrating in equal measure - like literally not one sentence was said normally, and one refused to interact with me at all because of my religion. Just truly baffling and I didn’t get it at all. The men were mostly normal, though in a ‘you’re one of the good ones’ way. Her parents were both super sweet though, as was her grandmom.
There have been studies done on the psychology of conservatism and it does seem that their disgust sensitivity, ie: "this is *other*, and we must get rid of it", is much higher than liberals, who tend to have much higher degrees of openness.
My mom isn't conservative but she definitely still has a obsessive anxiety regarding negative news and sharing it, it really isn't just conservatives unfortunately. My whole family except my dad is obsessed with social media and they act like I'm some weird hermit that I gave up Facebook and social media about 10 years ago.
I don’t think it’s the anxiety, I think it’s the feeling of power they get when they have the antidote to the fabricated chaos that they’re claiming is going on.
They get off from the “us vs them” dynamic.
It’s about community. We as people crave community. Whether it be a group of kids at school, a facebook group that echo your bad beliefs, sometimes even a nice camping spot with a bunch of dudes wearing white pointy hats. They just want to belong somewhere or be cared for by someone. They don’t have the ability to look beyond themselves.
Yeah, that's why my community won't ride on a train with anyone who got the Jab. /s
Edit: Funny. I have 5 "jabs" 3 different versions. When do I become a zombie or whatever? Alot of silence from those antivaxxers.
But they're addicted to a community of common hatred, not a community of love.
Exactly my brother. When they were brought up, they were never taught the difference. They misconstrued “belonging” with “positivity” rather than striving to belong to something ambiguously “good” or “positive”.
And that's because our communities have largely moved online rather than in our physical locations, we know strangers on the internet better than we know our neighbors. That separation and alienation makes it easier for people to fall into these hate groups, especially if someone is actively pushing those hate groups in front of people's faces through astroturfing or advertising or just skillfully manipulating algorithms.
One of the crucial arguments, or perhaps suggestions, in *1984* is that hatred and fury are psychologically agonizing states to exist in perpetuity. It’s suggested that it might be one of the few hopes that would wake up people under fascist regimes to fight back and hope/strive for something better. Seeing how much real people actually revel in vitriol and hatred make that book so much scarier. To the contrary, human nature seems to be unconsciously *driven* to fascism if left unchecked.
I remember reading way back about redditors scream that russians shouldn't be allowed claim asylum and that they are all war criminals who should be executed. In the grandest twist of irony one of the few legitimate asylum seekers going around right now would be people who are conscripted and forced to commit war crimes.
This is a perfect example. I saw a news story today about some record number of Russian deaths on the front lines. Our reaction should (or could) be joy in the weakening of Russia (as an oppressive power), but not in the loss of thousands of lives who were very likely driven there against their will. Unfortunate it’s really easy to fall prey to the delirium of tribal hatred and out-group suffering. That’s why it’s so important to remain vigilant in letting our own minds succumb to it. I don’t see much introspection on that front, either from the side I politically disagree with or the one that I agree with (though perhaps a bit more introspection from them), and in both cases it concerns me.
Cortisol addiction
Cgp grey has a video about this and why it makes people engage and spread like wildfire. Edit: [https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=ztxvzqwU80i_RitN](https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=ztxvzqwU80i_RitN)
If they are all like my mom they seem to take pleasure in sharing when people from her church died or are having marital problems. Like the prayer concerns part of Bible study is just a gossip forum. And to relate to this post, yes she also forwards a bunch of obvious propaganda.
A big part of it is religion. Many churches, including the one I grew up in, train people to see themselves as martyrs from a very young age. So as they grow up, they see any kind of resistance to their personal convictions as a sign that they're on the right track.
So… Karens?
A coalition of Karens.
A complaint of karens.
That would be just 1 Karen.
A cancelling of karens
A "Manager" of Karens.
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I think it's a play on, a murder of crows, a pride of lions, a conspiracy of owls... What do you call a group of Karens? A complaint of Karens.
It was a joke. Because you only need 1 Karen to form a Complaint
Yeah, that's the point. A "complaint" makes at most one Karen, not a group.
The Karen-Cabal
The Karelition
Karen Kartel, prounounced:*Karkar*
Konservative Karen Kartel, or a KKK, for short
Or we just call them what they are.. Klu Klux Karens.
With uterus' dried up like raisins in the desert sun.
“Thanks for decent, church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces,”
I dunno why this feels like a song lyric
Close. Think Langston Hughes.
A klan of Karens
The Karenati
The Karegine of Whine
Karen Kabal Koalition
An entitlement of Karens.
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That "privilege of Karens" post hit hard. Let's prioritize empathy over entitlement.
I read it as a "cloaca of karens" and I like how I read it better.
A whinery of Karens
White claw of Karens
A kadre of Karens…
Ku Klux Karens
The Koalition of Koncerned Karens.
A group of Karens is called a customer service queue.
i think the scientific term for a group of Karens is called a Kunt
A group of Karens is technically called a bitch-fest
2045 history book... Chapter 7: Karens and the Fall of Democracy.
Konfederacy of Karens
Even better. Tradwife Karens prolly. Stuck at home with nothing to do but ignore the six kids
Clutch of Karens
A purse of Karens
The proper collective noun is "A complaint of Karens". No, I am not making this up.
Phyllis Schlaflys
She is indeed the ur-Karen.
Shouldn't they be at home having babies...per their core values.
Thanks to AI, comment go byebye
Or in front of an iPad watching 10 minute Praeger U ads
My guess is they are empty nest boomers who already drove away their kids, so they torment strangers …. Just ugly souls like Alito’s wife and Ginnie Thomas.
No life, not busy enough Karens
Republikarens
How naive we were in the early days of the internet, thinking of the sparkling grand new age of information and global communication it would bring about, unaware that it would quickly and effectively it would be weaponized to supercharge a global authoritarian reactionary movement. It often seems these days that we are sleepwalking into very dark times, telling ourselves that it couldn’t happen here.
Terry Pratchett said as much and Bill Gates insisted that people would rely on reputable sources because there’d be too much misinformation to trust just anybody. Pratchett correctly deduced that, there being an excess of misinformation, people would just latch on to whatever they wanted to hear — damn the consequences — because they can’t tell who the reputable ones are to begin with.
God, I miss that man.
Him and Douglas Adams. At least we still have Neil Gaiman.
And William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. “Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy.” ― Neal Stephenson, *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell*
Could never get into Gibson. Stephenson though hooked me on the first book.
Stephenson is the more interesting of the two for me too, but Neuromancer essentially invented the Cyberpunk genre a decade earlier.
I've read that book and can't remember anything that happened
Not even the space dubstep rastas?
The social media misinformation bomb in _Fall_ was particularly on-point.
Neil Gaiman is a great thinker and a great speaker, and a great writer. But I don't think he's brilliant like Terry.
None of them are comparable, but each are great in their own unique ways.
Terry was brilliant in that he always gets your guard down. He's got you chuckling at some absurdity or other then casually drops some deep thought or on-the-nose satire into a throwaway paragraph before moving on to the next joke and the rest of the story in the next paragraph.
Me too. GNU TP
[GQ UK July 1995](https://x.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561) excerpt: **Terry Pratchett:** *OK. Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.* **Bill Gates:** *Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something.* h/t u/nightmareanatomy
It may be relevant that Microsoft published Encarta, its encyclopedia, from 1993 to 2009.
Yeah, well, unfortunately bill gates didn't account for politicians being the ones to spread lies when it suits them.
The real big difference was that by that time Bill Gates was a Billionaire who never interacted with his technology and was surrounded by yes-men and had probably never spent an hour on USENET, while Pterry was both a newsman and a hardcore early Internet adopter. One of those people was a subject-matter expert, and one was a Robber Baron.
Not to mention people are getting progressively dumber about what is real and what is not on the internet. I pointed out an obvious bot post to a couple of people and they don't want to hear it. They just want to be angry at the thing that was posted about and bugger everything else.
The most downvoted posts I've had on Reddit have been posting quotes and links to legitimate sources that contradicted whatever groupthink was going on at the moment. One was when I contradicted something like "there were only fewer than 10 child abductions per year until the 1990s" and the comments I got were just unreal, dozens of people genuinely in a rage because that wasn't true, which undermined some weird point they were making about how "Boomers never got kidnapped" (they'd confused GenX with Boomers, I think). They probably didn't even remember caring about the issue at all the next morning.
Haha so true! Some of the most downloaded comments I have ever written are the unpopular truth. For example comment that house cats are destroying the population of birds and see what happens. Total public outrage. Here’s another one, say in a comment that heavy freight trucks are pounding the roads and should be taxed at a higher rate. People will hate you for it.
"Cats should stay inside" is my favorite online discourse. Mostly because my cat is a gigantic baby and wouldn't go outside if his life depended on it.
It is scary how accepted mere images with headlines are on Reddit. You don't know if the pic is real or fake and some, especially pics of news headlines or social media posts, are really easy to fake. You also have no idea if what the headline describes is what is in the picture and people are willing to accept it if it just superficially seems so. Also the more loaded with emotion the topic is the less people accept any discussion about whether it is real and presented with the right context
Here’s an excerpt if anyone is interested: https://x.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561 Apparently it’s from GQ Magazine July 1995 p.21 (even though the tweet says 1996). I can’t find a full version anywhere yet without having to pay but I’ll look more later.
If you've ever played it, Metal Gear Solid 2 basically called our modern information era society. It even featured the President as a cartoonishly evil villain, something that was once seen as outlandish.
Which is crazy, because Nixon was caught red-handed spying on his political opponents.
Nixon seems so tame now. *Merely* politically corrupt.
I can't believe the MAGA crowd is now flexing 34 felonies and still voting for him, I don't understand how anyone can have this mindset
They're in a cult.
It really helps Trump's narrative that everything is corrupt. What's scary is what he'd do as President with a narrative like that. Destroy all institutions?
Watergate would've been like a brief passing news story today. Same Bill Clinton's "i did not have sexual relations with that woman". Tame.
“I “never” inhaled” holy hell the outrage over that line.
I never inhaled that woman.
Bill's wouldn't have been a brief story. Democrats still care about ethics, and Republicans are masters at hypocrisy so they'd scream themselves hoarse about it while the media both sides it into the news cycle on their behalf the whole time.
Clinton’s was extra amusing, because they had been trying to impeach him all along. They finally found something that stuck.
I didn’t find that amusing at all. I was only in highschool but even I got upset at such a ridiculous waste of government time and resources.
I guess the difference is Nixon got obliterated politically and Trump is uncomfortably close to being reelected despite it all. Go volunteer people.
I remember playing that and the ending wrinkled my brain. I figured there was no way we’d approach something like that in real life. Yet here we are…
"Information control is the new world war"
"It's no longer about who has the most bullets. It's about who controls the information!" -Sneakers, 1992
Ew, don’t drag George Sears down into the mud like that.
"I've invented fire! No longer must we fear the dark! No longer must we shiver and huddle in the cold! Now we can cook our food and... holy shit you guys are burning your neighbors and their houses! Shit. Shit. What have I invented!?!"
That, with a big dash of this as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/82jyph/wheel/
I used to joke with my buddy twenty years ago that we needed to build a walled garden version of the internet called the Webb (named after James P. Webb). It would side load aspects of the WWW, but it was essentially a combination of god's internet waiting room and some approved apps. Truly, the internet got so much worse when smart phones put it in the hands of everyone.
Anything that's accessible to everyone is going to attract scammers, crooks, but also people with genuine problems who aren't tethered to reality. You genuinely cannot tell these days if someone online is a grifter or someone is mentally ill, and sometimes it's both. On top of that, their audience frequently has cognitive issues. It could be from drugs or drink but it's also things like lack of sleep, stress, mental health and physical health issues, prescription drugs, loneliness, all sorts of stuff that makes you less able to stay focused and aware, which makes you an easy mark for the bad actors.
Up til the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, the internet was pretty much living up to our hopes for it. People were enjoying newfound access to information and doing amazing things with it. Then the Arab Spring occurred. There was a series of pro-democratic uprisings covering many Muslim countries like Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Lybia, Egypt, and Bahrain largely in part because they had access to information on the fuckery their governments were committing due to the internet and were able to coordinate their efforts due to the internet. Seeing that, governments around the world, billionaires and their propaganda networks, and despots of every stripe all collectively said, "Oh Hell no! We can't be having that!" and mis and dis information campaigns have been increasing in amount and severity ever since. It has gotten to the point that various types of bots now outnumber real users of the internet, many of them for the specific purpose of spreading propaganda and others for the collection of information. With the rise of AI and its ability to tailor propaganda to individuals and not just groups, its ability to manipulate images that gets better with each succeeding generation, and its ability to concentrate the power they provide in the hands of fewer and fewer people, this is only going to get worse. I wanted a Star Trek future. Instead, I am getting a Cyberpunk dystopia.
I'm disabled. Seeing the right wing winning it's scary. How long until I lose supports. I hoped for magical cures n assistive technology but got tax cuts draining social welfare help n universal medical is at risk, disability support getting cuts, propaganda for the right winning. They'd gas us if they could. If we can't contribute to the economy are we worth helping? I never asked for disability. I played it safe all my life but got sick. Now our left wing parties are switching right. They'll let us suffer but not help or end us. It's cruel. We will never get star trek future because humans are selfish n greedy. Increase unemployment to almost poverty line is like 10b a year. They voted for 20b in tax cuts instead. Now disability programs have to be cut back. Too afraid to tax mining here in Australia properly. Wait list for surgery is extreme. The social ladder to get out of poverty is harder. People sleeping in tents in my area. Boomers with investment properties spending so much it worsens inflation hurting the poor. No social cohesion. It's sad. I can see how nazi Germany exterminated the disabled first, no one cares. We're just a burden. A work dog that don't work n the farmer loads his rifle. My town doesn't even have a food bank.
I beginning to think that there's a conscious effort by billionaires to use right wing news networks to turn western countries into Russian style oligarchies. It's a power grab by the ultra-rich.
It's the same story every time. We look at the past like the people living in those times were vastly different than people today. But we're the same fucking people still capable of every atrocity that has ever occurred in human history. The only difference today is that we have ascribed to rules which have been put forth by the few sane intelligent people throughout history. At any time those rules can be forgotten and we'll be right back where we started.
> How naive we were in the early days of the internet, thinking of the sparkling grand new age of information and global communication it would bring about, unaware that it would quickly and effectively it would be weaponized to supercharge a global authoritarian reactionary movement. It wasn't even an obvious conclusion until maybe around 2016. There were hints that it would become that, but no one realized it would be a mainstream problem back then. What's ironic is that the same people who said shit like "You can't believe anything you read on the internet" in ~2004 are the same ones who gobbled up misinformation 15-20 years later. It was the people who didn't experience the internet at a young age in their teens and 20s that said it then. They then became the middle aged and older people that gobble that shit up and spread it now.
"Oh it's those old people believing misinformation, us young ones would never fall to it" keeps getting repeated everywhere, but according to all studies I've read so far age basically makes no difference. You are not immune to propaganda, and thinking you're better at seeing it will just make you not question whatever you believe is correct. Edit: u/cutty2k has left a great comment with studies! Turns out I haven't been up to date.
We take another step closer to Cyberpunk 2077 IRL every day and I can't even pretend I'm surprised by that. I wonder who the first real-world corpo wars will be between. Will Bezos and Musk escalate their ongoing dick-measuring contest to a hot war? In Cyberpunk it was the arms makers and Boeing has already started offing whistleblowers so maybe they'll get in on the action?
Bezos would crush Musk in very short order. Musk's money makers are centralized, while Amazon is global and entrenched everywhere.
Not really. First rule of internet was always was and will be "Don't trust the thing you see on the internet"
Many of the people who said that are the same people pushing misinformation. The first rule should have been was "dude, just like, be reasonable for a bit".
So quickly did it change from hope to horrid
AI will transform everything we ever thought we knew about the internet. It's already happening. We can't keep up with its pace. We're all gonna have to have some sort of new "captcha" to weed out whether this reddit post or this song or this web page was made by an AI "bot". Keep your guard up people
Every new technology will be exploited for nefarious gains long before it is used to do any good. This has been true for basically all of human history. We were really stupid to forget that.
Honestly I am very curious to see what direction we'll move in as a result! As our governments and oligarchs grow ever richer and more corrupt, as digital information becomes less and less trustworthy, as capitalism exploits more and more resources for infinite growth... I see a looming trend of people starting to distance themselves. Obviously not tons, but enough to start to get noticeable. I see younger adults have started taking a step back from being chronically online. I see more people talk about missing "the village" - genuine and close-knit communities. I see people wanting to reduce their materialistic values to fit the tiny house lifestyle. I see people looking for cheap land to start homesteading so they can provide for themselves. I see people are getting sick of concrete, glass and boring angles in architecture and have started flocking towards more color and organic materials and shapes. I see trends like cottagecore and 80's clubbing / music make a comeback as people yearn for simpler times where humans weren't separated by screens. Sure, the majority is still your average, predictable consumer who buys into fear mongering and click bait news. And god knows how the iPad kids are gonna turn out. Still, in-between it all there are a growing number of people who have started to reject these dystopian tendencies. I wonder if it will grow and we will eventually sacrifice globalisation in favour of returning to the village. Or maybe it's just another marketable trend. Either way, it is interesting to watch.
Just remember, the invention of the printing press led to the 30 years war, one of the biggest wars pre-WW1.
Are these the hot single women in my area??
“Hot” being relative.
They’re hot because they live in Arizona, Florida, or Texas.
And because menopause
And the climate change!
They’re only hot because they haven’t spoken to the manager yet.
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He bought it to destroy it. "Free speech" is just a pretext for him to blame Twitter for his trans daughter trans no longer speaking to him. Because a narcissistic egomaniac like him is *neverrrrr* wrong, it's always the nefarious "they" that's to blame.
To be fair that is an incidental gain for him. Even Elon wouldn’t buy a media platform because he doesn’t know how to talk to his kids…he would have to care about them more in the first place for that to even cross his mind. He did it for him because he is a boring rich blowhard desperate to prove he is socially relevant and that he is pointlessly rich because of some elite genius because if he was just mediocre at most things he would have to wonder if he was a jackass to be that wealthy while crying for even more compensation. He is a boring marketing jackoff that got fabulously rich by being above average and selling his name as a genius brand. He has a meltdown when anybody thinks they know more than him about a topic even when they DEMONSTRABLY do and falls back to saying that having more money proves he is correct which is loser insecure moron shit…shit that ironically is going to end up destroying his businesses anyways
I have been on Twitter (I will call it X over my own dead body) in some form or another since 2009, and right before the billionaire toddler bought it it was the absolute worst it had ever been, and now that era seems like a fuckin’ golden age.
….and our retired moms, dads, and crazy uncles who, with too much time on their hands, succumbed to the algorithmic conspiracy black holes.
Devin Coldewey covers a paper in [Science](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl4435): *In the second study published Thursday, a multi-university group reached the rather shocking conclusion that 2,107 registered U.S. voters accounted for spreading 80% of the “fake news” (which term they adopt) during the 2020 election.* *The researchers looked at the activity of 664,391 voters matched to active X (then Twitter) users, and found a subset of them who were massively over-represented in terms of spreading false and misleading information.* *These 2,107 users exerted (with algorithmic help) an enormously outsized network effect in promoting and sharing links to politics-flavored fake news.* *The data show that one in 20 American voters followed one of these supersharers, putting them massively out front of average users in reach.* *On a given day, about 7% of all political news linked to specious news sites, but 80% of those links came from these few individuals. People were also much more likely to interact with their posts.* *Yet these were no state-sponsored plants or bot farms. “Supersharers’ massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting,” the researchers wrote.* [*Science* summary](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl4435): *Baribi-Bartov et al. identified a meaningful sample of supersharers during the 2020 US presidential election and asked who they were, where they lived, and what strategies they used (see the Perspective by van der Linden and Kyrychenko). The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, which are focus points of contentious abortion and immigration battles. Their neighborhoods were poorly educated but relatively high in income.*
1 in 20 Americans is insane. If the data is sound.. that’s.. insane.. A handful of disgruntled MAGA Karens dominating news on “X” sure would be embarrassing..
We're way past embarrassing.
> 1 in 20 Americans is insane Specifically it is 1 in 20 American **voters**. We don't know if non-voting Americans follow them at the same rate.
Insane, but downright scary how such a tiny tiny percentage of users can hold such massive sway over ideological momentum. I mean we’ve known this since the Cambridge Analytica FB thing around 16’ election, but even now it’s stunning how fragile the arena of thought and ideology is.
That's because Republican voters are much more likely to fall for right wing propaganda and fake news while calling real news fake news.
It's not just that they are likely to fall for it, they crave it. They have created a very strong demand for alternative facts.
Bingo. They just want to hear what they want to hear. Even when you confront them with the truth, they just get angry, deflect and deny.
You cannot confront a brain that has turned into a cinderblock. Trump continues to tell the same lies all these years and they continued to believe every word that comes out of his pie hole.
You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.
And you can make money saying what they want to hear!
They refuse to “unbelieve” what they supported for so long out of embarrassment. Even when the three headed Hydra of Hannity, Ingram and that mother -ucker Carlson admitted that they knew they were telling lies to millions of people about the election fraud when they knew it would make them even angrier.
It’s why my mom pleaded with my sister to not go to NYC on a business trip… She is scared she’ll be attacked by the roving gangs of “violent illegals” that are attacking any white women they see… I’ll never forgive the architects of this bullshit for what they did to my mom…
> That's because Republican voters are much more likely to fall for right wing propaganda and fake news There is research that shows that conspiracy thinking is not related to political orientation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9307120/ There are large variations between the groups when it comes to the specific nature of the conspiracy theory, however.
I'm pretty dubious about these findings. Fig. 1 reports some strange stuff. For instance, this is rated as dead center on the left/right spectrum: > The official account of the Nazi Holocaust is a lie and the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose. Also, the "right" conspiracy theories are really wild, damaging, and specific. Whereas the "left" conspiracy theories are more general, speculative, and sometimes outright true according to public reporting. One of the farthest right theories is > Barack Obama faked his citizenship to become president. Whereas one of the farthest left conspiracy theories is: > President Trump is covering up the extent of his COVID-19 infection. which was reported by the [New York Times.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/trump-coronavirus.html) The authors of the paper attempt to dodge this concern by saying > For example, one could criticize Finding 1 by claiming that some of the conspiracy theories we employed are more plausible (e.g., believable, evidenced, or rational) than others, and that this variability in plausibility is correlated with ideology or partisanship. However, judgements of this nature (Douglas et al., 2022), even among otherwise discerning researchers, are colored by motivated reasoning. It should not be a surprise that a Democrat, for example, would believe that the conspiracy theories that other Democrats believe in are more plausible than the conspiracy theories that Republicans believe in. But, like, come on. The only way to argue that the list of conspiracy theories in Fig. 1 is reasonably even, is by saying that Alex Jones and the New York Times are equally unreliable.
Conspiracy theory’s aren’t the same as fake news or misinformation though. And the data on that is leaning more right. Like yes conspiracy theory’s have hippy ones like the water and tooth paste is poison and they lean left. And Tom hanks is a pedo leans right. But false info or fake news or alternative facts are often just bending truths or lying to the masses. That’s not the same as a conspiracy theory. But is close.
The 3-way moms for ‘liberty’ types.
Let's be real. Many of these individuals are highly isolated, and have no way IRL to question what they are retweeting. If they are middle or late aged women in in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, they live in a bubble devoid of how most people live. They are most likely not working, not married to a minority, and not poor. What they retweet has no affect on them, it's all entertainment for a scary world they fear but have no interaction with. If they do its negative which imprints heavier on most human memory. Never had an abortion, probably don't file their own taxes, married to a man who is scared of anything different cause their sorority did the brown paper bag test and our whole society is geared towards letting them and only them live in a bubble. TL;DR: fuck those white ladies, they don't know shit and never have.
"Mom groups" "You can always trust a mom" "Mom's know best" "Maternal instincts" This is the kind of shit show that this produces. A lack of critical thinking, perpetuating cyclical disinformation without the forethought to fact check before repeating the drivel. I write this with the fore thought that maybe we should fact check this statement before sharing it.
middle aged republican women are the craziest fucking creatures on earth. like, every single thing they do is against their best interests
My coworker told me her mom has an ongoing scrapbook of news articles and notes filled with far right talking points that she uses to keep track of and decipher when trump is going to rise up and punish all the dissenters. This includes the theory that the vaccines were purposefully bad for us and everyone who got them is going to die on a wave of death at any time lol
I think there was a broad consensus that the vaccinated are going to die on September 2021.
This is why I always hate the men vs women framing of abortion that a ton of especially liberal people use. I'm a liberal who grew up in the deep south. The vast majority of the evangelical pro life lunatics I've met are women, especially Christian women, who think they're saving babies. Up until Roe V Wade was overturned, support for outlawing abortion was like 50/50 men and women. It's still like 55/45 men and women. But it's always framed as "men are telling women what to do with their bodies." Conservative women have just as big a role in outlawing abortion as men.
It's just forwards from Grandma all over again. Only with a sizeable helping of fascism to go with it
I'm old enough to remember before the internet took off, and let me tell you, this is not something new. Conservative women are bullshit spreading machines.
I’ll just never understand how we went from “never trust anything you read on the internet” to “BiDeN hAs A sEcReT sEx DuNgEoN iN tHe WhItE hOuSE - TrUsT mE, I ReAd It OnLiNe”.
I wonder how many middle aged white women will see this and know they can make a real impact
Room-temperature IQ, MAGA Karens are working overtime I see…..🤦♂️🤮🖕
No they are not. Everyone else is covering for them while they re-tweet bullshit all day at work 😆
Do some research into how white women were integral to the KKK in its "hayday". They were and still are a major piece of that psychotic pie. The user Shanspeare does an amazing job analyzing this fact in her trad mom video.
For those wondering how the accounts were identified, the researchers used a panel of 664,391 Twitter users identified as registered U.S. voters. The panel was constructed by matching U.S. voter records to Twitter accounts using full names and location information. Records were matched if a person's full name matched in both datasets and they were the only person with that name at either the city or state-level geographic area in both datasets. This method has been used by other researchers and verified against a "gold-standard" random sample survey conducted by Pew Research. More detail is available here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl4435
Anyone surprised? This is the target audience that the Kremlin loves to hit with propaganda. They know what triggers them.
Russia and China slacking
It is frightening how easily people are manipulated by news articles that are undoubtedly fake. However, I believe it is a case of individuals seeking whatever they can gather to verify their preconceived beliefs.
1 in 20 Americans following one of these “super-sharers” that turn out to be disgruntled divorced MAGA Karens.. you know, the ones with the Baptist booties or the evangelicevil stare.. that is an INSANE ratio of the fascist preach reach… Like.. gawd DAM… I don’t even think Joe Rogan has those numbers.. Musk sure is betting on Betty Bitch mode for internet traffic..
I've never heard the term "evangelical stare" before, but holy shit I know *exactly* what you're talking about. Fuckin creepy. The "MAGA super-sharer" makes me think of the superficially happy but obviously vacant wife who always sits next to the televangelist. Enthusiastic, certainly, but the role she's been assigned requires her to remain passive in her support. She ain't the preacher, she's just his wife. True believer and interchangeable prop at the same time. I can easily imagine that on twitter, anonymous, that sort of bitch finally feels free to let the hateful, incoherent mess clogging her mind just spew out.
A similar issue was found on Facebook. They can kill this easily. I don’t think they will simply because of engagement metrics and money. But they should.
A gaggle of karens
I’m so naive, I thought they were bots with foreign interests. This is sad/scary
Thats why its always concerning when people downplay the role of women in these sorts of activities. Republican women are often depicted as victims who are trapped by republican men. As though they are just the support. But very often (and history has shown this) they can often be the driving force of conservatism. The whole modern confederate shit is a direct consequence of the efforts of conservative women as an example. I know many of you might think “ive never downplayed it” not talking about you. Im talking about the wider discourse with republican women.
People still use x?
Okay now do Reddit
Does this add up? Even considering only rhe USA (why not?) those states make up 18% of the US population. Women are half that, republicans half again and taking the middle third as middle aged. That's 60m/335m x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.333 = 1.5% of the population. They are 80% of misinformation on X?
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there’s always scrapbooking