She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.
the damage that corporate social media has inflicted on our social fabric and political discourse is beyond anything we could have imagined.
Yes, I agree - there have always been malevolent forces at work within the media - but before facebook started algorithmically whipping up old folks for clicks, cable TV news wasn’t quite as savage. The early days of hate-talk radio was really just Limbaugh ranting into the AM ether. Now, it’s saturated. Social media isn’t the root cause of political hatred but it gave it a bullhorn and a leg up to apparent legitimacy.
Talk radio or television broadcasts the same stuff to everyone. It’s damaging, absolutely. But social media literally tailors the shit to be exactly what will force someone farther down the rabbit hole. It’s actively, aggressively damaging and sends people on a downward spiral way faster while preventing them from encountering diverse viewpoints.
I agree it’s worse, but i was just thinking how there are regions where people play ONLY Fox on every public television, and if you turn on the radio it’s exclusively a right-wing propagandist ranting to tell you democrats are taking all your money to give it to black people on welfare.
Populism and racism is as old as societies. Anciant Greece already had it. Rome fell to it. Christianism is born out of it.
Funnily enough, people always complained about how bad their society was because of this new thing. Like 5 thousand years ago already. Probably earlier even.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t do anything about it. We definitely should. But common sense won’t save us unfortunately.
