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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

We need these protections immediately, not 30 years from now. How do we start a movement that builds awareness of the degree of digital tracking and surveillance everyone is subject to?

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There is no effect to the average American—at worst, they get some creepy ads from Facebook. People will not care about it until it affects them as much as something like soul-crushing medical / student debt.

If the actual twitter files stories by Taibbi et al were actually read and the claims and evidence understood rather than desperately trying to bury them and their authors in a partisan quagmire that would be a reasonable start. Was buried here and most people seem to think they're pro-republican somehow which they just aren't.

You run for office, and convince everyone else to do the same. Then you change the system from the inside.

Viral social media, like everything else that becomes an issue.

Why do you think anyone in the USA give a rip about Israel and Palestine? Very few people are out there doing their own research. They are consuming what is put in front of their faces.

That is something that’s been on my mind. There are so many conflicts and issues around the world. Why do people care about some? For example why is Israel and Palestine dominant when the Russia and Ukraine conflict has far more deaths? Or any of the numerous lesser known conflicts around the world. I agree social media is the medium but I wonder if there are other factors that make a particular issue worthy of virality.

Yes, it is pretty interesting how Israel vs Palestine is a huge issue with American college students right now, but none of them seemed to give a crap about the various Sudanese civil wars which have killed far more people.

China/Russia/Iran don't gain anything by sockpuppeting Sudan on social media.

I think most people only generally care about conflicts under two circumstances. The first is in places where they have preformed opinions - Israel and Palestine is a huge example there. It's also why the "messaging" from the media was completely ineffective on that conflict. People don't care about spinproganda in things they already have opinions on. But on things they don't have opinions on, they mostly only care if the media focuses on it. And the media tends only focus on things that the US political establishment focuses on. And said establishment only cares about conflicts that stand to affect our geopolitical influence one way or the other.

So for instance the Saudi "intervention" in Yemen is a great example of this reality playing out in real time. It's had hundreds of thousands of deaths and basically nobody cared, because the media scarcely brought it up. And the media rarely brought it up, because the US establishment didn't care. Relations with Saudi Arabia have completely tanked and they're fighting groups like the Houthis - so it was just a couple of "enemies" killing each other. Except now the Houthis have become quite relevant to US geopolitical interests, and so suddenly conflicts involving them become relevant to the US political establishment, and thus receiving substantially more coverage in the media.

You can see this quite clearly through a Google Trends query for "Yemen." [1] The Saudi "intervention" began in 2015. Internal conflicts in Yemen have been going on for far longer than that. Interest suddenly spiked in Yemen in the middle of October 2023. The Houthis began prohibiting Israel linked traffic through the Suez Canal on October 19th.

[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Probably because of the high number of civilian deaths in a much shorter period.

Adults are harder to split out into civilians vs combatants, so sticking with just kids, by the beginning of March, four months into the Israel Hamas conflict, there were about 12.5k children dead in Gaza and Israel (a few dozen Israeli children on October 7th, the rest are Palestinian casualties of war).

In Ukraine 15 months into the war only 1.5k children had been killed, (all Ukrainian).

Add to that that the US government is continuing to directly arm and support the Israeli government, whose attacks are killing those Palestinian kids.

How exactly do people "do their own research" about a war? Fly over there and hang out in the war zone themselves?

It's surprisingly easy. Both sides can generally be expected to lie, propagandize, and create misleading reports of various incidents. But those incidents are indeed generally true. So all you need to do is to look at what both sides are saying, find the overlap, and there you have the truth. Of course in this process you lose all the narrative, spin, and details - but that's more of a feature than a bug.

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