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Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back.
Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down.
This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
aka, you're on the other side now.
am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.”
again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
"In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before."
"⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"
"What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy." - William Butler Yeats
Plenty of sources on the uptick in attacks during the AIDS crisis, but here are three:
* https://review.gale.com/2017/05/17/the-homophobic-aids-crisi...
* https://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/exchange/2012/04/discr...
* https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/23/us/violence-against-homos...
Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism.
Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts.
Currently the "groomer" conspiracy theories seem to be headed towards some mass cultural violence event towards trangender people, with politicians openly calling for the "elimination" of transgerism, but that remains to be seen.
But let's ask what atrocities have ever been prevented by conspiracy theories? None. QAnon has been more of a hindrance to efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking than a benefit, and they were entirely focused on "decoding" the Podesta emails and "exposing" satanic rituals in the Democratic Party while Epstein was going about his business.
It should go without saying that none of the doomsday scenarios the COVID conspiracy theorists predicted came to pass. All they accomplished was making the pandemic worse. And no doubt the seeds of paranoia and mistrust they laid will make the next pandemic worse as well.
Hell, even MKUltra wasn't uncovered by conspiracy theorists - it was exposed by accident through an unrelated FOIA leak. NSA spying? The Simpsons did a bit about that before Snowden, but conspiracy theorists were going on about mind-control rays being beamed through televisions and mass hypnosis.
These people want the world to believe they are the the ones constantly telling truth to power, the only ones who can see the dark truths hidden behind the curtain, and they'll insist they are always right. But at best they only coincidentally appear to be right, in the same way as a stopped clock, and always in a way that does more harm than good.
May you live in interesting times indeed.
I do live in "interesting" times, thanks. In no small part because of the efforts of people like yourself.
1. Larped as a Viking 2. Stole a podium 3. Placed feet on a desk 4. Broke a window 5. Caused a woman, who was not in the same building, to cry
There were several other terrible acts committed by these evil people, but these were the most commonly cited ones. Sicknick's death was widely publicized at first, but then magically got blackholed later when it turned out that a group of QAnon-influenced platelets formed a blood clot that killed the poor patriot.
Fortunately for us, these evil insurrectionists were denied their due process rights for years, and our hallowed and beloved Congress members spent a full month of their valuable time on hearings to get to the bottom of this genocide.
January 6th: Never Again.
I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.
I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".
I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".
If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.