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Comment by whybroke | Hacker News Reader

>It's promoting behavior that is different from real life as they stand to gain from stoking outrages and heated discussions: more active user engagement!

This undoubtedly has very serious consequences beyond merely being annoying. Trending untrue news stories, encouraging post-true controversy and providing an echo chamber for these things to intensify and become ingrained.

And doing these things on a enormous scale to a huge percentage of the population such that vast swathes of people can no longer even agree on basic facts.

It would be interesting to see how much of the bizarre political events in the west are a result of social media in general and Facebook in particular.

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I've recently started seeing what I can only call christian jihadi propaganda on my newsfeed.

The Clintons assassinated Scalia and they are going to force you to renounce God or put you on the cross.

Bro, I'd ask you to not use the word "jihadi" as a slur. The word means one who strives, physically or mentally, for the sake of good. The fact that it's been hijacked by deviant so-called "religious" groups doesn't change what the word really represents.

And reinforcing the notion that those deviant groups are jihadis just strengthens the claims of ISIS and Al-Qaida that they're the ones properly following their religion, when more than 99% of the muslim world rejects them completely.

Pretty sure more than 1% of Muslims don't completely reject ISIS. Definitely not Al Qaida.

It's ways higher than 1%. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/...

Almost 1 in 10 supporting savage violence and meaningless destruction.

It's not the poster that made it a slur, it's the insane violence supported by a non-negligible portion of Muslims that made it a slur.

Twice that rate of Germans (16%) and Americans (18%) think the Sun goes around the earth.[1]

So does 9% really indicate a key culturally defining characteristic?

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-ge...

As long as thinking the sun goes around the earth doesn't induce violent murders, I don't care.

If you don't use the term "jihadi" because it's too positive you also should refrain from using the word "ISIS/ISIL" because that gives them being a state and Islamic. I understand that "Daesh" has a much more negative meaning and those guys hate being called that way.

Prevlcisely what ZainRiz said. Jihad is a striving for a good goal.

One can have a jihad for school fundraiser. One can jihad for personal weight loss. Or one can jihad for working on an open source project.

Yeah, the bad ones use it to support ill gains.

Sure, one can also go around yelling "Sieg Heil" at celebrations, but the phrase has been a little tainted by insane people.

To be honest there is probably very little difference between those people back in the 1930's and the polarized groups of US voters on both sides of the spectrum. They didn't know at the time what exactly they were voting for and the consequences that would play out.

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