Stop with the bs. Americans are doing this all by themselves
Oh, my bad.
It might be true that there are bad actors - some even from china or russia - that are intentionally stoking tensions in the us, but dismissing that tension as manufactured would be a mistake.
Democracy is supposed to be a pressure valve for political dissent, and when those institutions start failing to address the demands of citizens, they start looking for more and more extreme ways to make their dissatisfaction known. American democracy stopped addressing the grievances of the people long before 2016 came along. Trump himself embodies an antiestablishment resentment that could be seen making itself known all the way back in 2008 and 2012, most vividly (in my mind, at least) during the townhall with Romney in 2011 when the conservative members in the crowd yelled at him that Obama was a terrorist. Both parties have been trying to suppress the populist sentiment in their respective bases for a long time, and 2016 was merely a watershed moment for what was set in motion a long time ago.
Which is why I find myself with mixed feelings in the wake of Kirk’s death; catharsis, for seeing a stochastic agitative propagandist being on the receiving end of the violent environment he actively created and advocated for, and fear and frustration, for knowing that his death will do nothing to quell the surge in fascism and likely only embolden many more to do the same.
what the hell is “online violence”
Framing to attack free speech.
Daily beast article spreading dubious info pointing fingers at Russians and Chinese bots, based on what Cox said.
What does “vs disinfo” mean? “Fediverse vapidly slinging disinfo”?
Don’t blame American lunatics on Russians and Chinese. It wasn’t the Russians or the Chinese that voted for Trump or shot Charlie Kirk.
No, the Americans just voted for them after being brainwashed by tons of Russian and Chinese propaganda.
Americans are stupid, but the Russians and Chinese propaganda machines are not innocent.
Don’t give them all the credit.
We have enough homegrown propaganda on our own.
Americans need to take responsibility for the state their country is in, and not find excuses or scapegoats to blame.
Lol wtf is my “responsibility” here?
That like 3 billionaires directly control all media in my country? That I was never in possession of any political leverage to oppose the oil/pharma/tech/etc… lobbies? That it’s completely impossible for me to find any suitable representation in a two party system that has been entrenched for 200+ years? That my politicians have been steadily captured by domestic and foreign money, ruled as “free speech” by a group of robed geriatrics who have held their lifetime seats since before I was old enough to form a political thought?
Unless you’re going to sell me some plausible counter history where the entire system was upended, where the fuck does any American’s personal “responsibility” come into play? Telling me I should have saved the world by voting better is as big a lie as telling end consumers to save the ecosystem by recycling.
This sounds a lot like motivated reasoning to me. Frustration and resentment has been simmering in the US long before social media was big enough to be useful in astroturfing campaigns.
I mean Laura loomer is clearly a lizard in the least convincing skin suit I’ve ever seen
Trump is a pedo
RELEASE THE FILES
The number of AI generated images reinforcing the apoplectic right’s unchecked hatred of the left is astonishing, along with a flood of pic/text images along the same lines. Just blind hatred all demanding something be done to the left.
I am so glad I abandoned Instagram and friends. I have no idea about this and I would be unhappy to see it in action.
Those bots have been so successful the past few years that if they shut them all down tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter because they managed to radicalize enough idiots to keep it going.
They’ve actually studied this and found it not to be true. I’ll look for the study later, but it said that if you cut off access to Fox News and Facebook, people get less racist and wanting to do harm.
Do they really? Or are they just less emboldened to verbalize their bigotry?
If one stops drinking alcohol, one stops being drunk.
I think people in groups acclimatize to the vibe of their surroundings and verbalize things in a nudged way to land well within the group. So if the group is toxic, the nudge will be toxic.
I suspect a surprising percentage of people just follow the crowd. No effort required to formulate any bigotry or predudice or whatever, just copy others and you’re part of the gang. If there’s nothing to copy they just shrink out of view.
If you stop exciting them they return to a low energy state
Seem the same studies. Google “if you cut off access to Fox News and Facebook, people get less racist and wanting to do harm”
There are plenty of reputable resources to investigate.
well actually, it actually stops thier momentum. case in point on reddit, when they were actually clean sweeping all the propaganda bot, the site remained extremely quiet for a few days of any astroturfing or “both sides” bs. yea it doesnt stop the violence, they just lose steam really quickly. the Right constantly need something to poke them into action.
Hey, guess who invented Fox News. You think they stopped there as the internet became the new battleground? Why don’t we hear about what the GOP bots are doing? China and Russia, though guilty themselves, are generally red herrings in these contexts because the GOP doesn’t want the fingers pointed where they belong.
I don’t think the GOP isn’t trying, but I think Russia in particular is just way ahead of the game where this stuff is concerned. Democrats in no way have a monopoly on just being coked-up boomers bouncing around Washington having no real coherent idea of what successful political strategy looks like and not really having to care. I think most of the successful non-mainstream-media manipulation and funding comes from outside the country, it just happens that what they want to happen lines up with promoting the GOP by coincidence.
Wrong. The GOP has been planning their coup since the 1970s. Fox came out in 1996. They wrote the playbook on dismantling America and have been working on it since before the internet brought Russian bots. Before trump got enriched by Moscow money.
Yeah, and they’re still using the playbook they worked out in the 90s: AM radio and cable news channels. If they were as hip as the Russians are in terms of hooking up social media bots and funding podcasters, we’d be in even more trouble than we currently are.
I’m not saying they didn’t do a ton of home-grown damage (and are continuing to), I’m just saying the landscape has changed enough that they’re not where the forefront of innovation is at this point.
Russian bots are gop bots.
whos actually distrbuting disinfo to fox, its putin, Murdoch and putin has been seen several times working together.
Unrelated but gdamn his face is shrunken
Paid for by various organizations in America.
Cambridge Analytica provided proof of concept, the bastards.
When last night’s phone call from the folks turned to Kirk and violence, I made a point to mention that, yes, there were lots of posts for violent ‘retribution’, but we have no idea how many are just bots trying to stir the pot rather than actual people – but consoled? them that it was still proper to worry because surely those posts would convince some suggestible people that the bot-post ideas are a widely held and acceptable reaction.
Well it shouldn’t be so easy tbh
True that, our society is soft and complacent and that is the cause of most of our problems.
What does being soft and complacent even mean??? Western states do everything they can to propagandize people since birth, so whenever some racist asshole is the only one to use glaringly obvious contradictions -that no one in power will address (because it endagers their position)- people will accept that asshole as a truthsayer.
Perfect example: immigration
I have been more active, but I don’t know about a “tremendous amount”
“probable right wing pundit says russia and china is to blame”
