heywood on 21/10/2020 at 17:36
Gryz - I don't think we really disagree, I'm just pushing the theory that social media changed the scale of things.
Renzatic on 21/10/2020 at 18:12
Social media certainly made it easier to advertise to those with predilections towards wild conspiracies.
I'm sure a good number of us here have watched a QAnon video or two on Youtube. If you have, you'll see how once you watch that one video, you're almost immediately spammed with suggestions and advertisements for even more QAnon videos and opinion pieces. After awhile, it's practically all you'll see on Youtube.
It's the same with Facebook. Like one conspiracy site, you're suggested three more. Like those three, you get 9 more suggestions.
Social media has made it so that people can immerse themselves almost exclusively among other likeminded conspiracy theorists, growing and strengthening their communities through nothing more than this shared similar interest, and their needs for more information are perpetually provided them by the magic of targeted market algorithms.
catbarf on 21/10/2020 at 20:32
Cory Doctorow has a recent piece called (
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59) How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism about this topic. The whole thing is about twice as long as it needs to be, and half of it is what we already know: that data-driven tech firms (social media sites, but also services like Google) are driven by profit to show people things that they are more likely to click on, which contributes to hate groups and conspiracy theories.
But the other half is where his term 'surveillance capitalism' comes from- he argues that the social media business model is only possible because of monopolies that enable large tech companies to gather enough data to build accurate profiles of people, while preventing any alternatives from emerging. Rather than respond by requiring businesses to police their users' content, which favors established firms with the resources to do so and thus further reinforces monopoly, he says the only long-term solution is to enforce anti-trust laws and break up those monopolies. Tying in with the economic angle, there's also an argument that increased wealth concentration over time has enabled greater lobbying of regulatory agencies, undermining trust in those institutions as sources of truth and giving rise to conspiracy theories as alternatives.
So basically his explanation for what's happening to America goes something like: 1. political/economic corruption makes people lose trust in institutions -> 2. extensive monopolies allow Big Tech data algorithms to recognize when this is happening to someone -> 3. social media serves them radicalizing content at their most vulnerable. His take is people talk about #3 without recognizing how #1 and #2 are the root causes that need to be addressed.
I'm not sure how much I buy it all, but it's an interesting perspective.
Jason Moyer on 22/10/2020 at 02:35
Trump is just the natural conclusion to the Southern Strategy. The GOP was ok building a base around looneys, they just didn't expect the looneys to band together and oust them from the party leadership.
Starker on 22/10/2020 at 08:41
Guess which presidential candidate (
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/trump-taxes-china.html) turned out to have a previously unreported bank account in China?
Rachel Maddow had a short segment commenting on it:
[video=youtube;gNmvHb9DgC4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNmvHb9DgC4[/video]
Quote Posted by demagogue
I bet Trump has "tucked in his shirt" quite a lot around (young) women. :laff:
To quote Colbert, he was merely launching a fact-finding mission to his own groin.
SubJeff on 22/10/2020 at 08:45
What's wrong with having a bank account in China?
And does he have to declare where he has accounts?
heywood on 22/10/2020 at 10:05
For tax purposes, you're required to report yearly on any foreign account in which your balance exceeded USD 10k during the year.
demagogue on 22/10/2020 at 12:52
Quote Posted by SubJeff
What's wrong with having a bank account in China?
Almost exactly last year, (
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-whistleblower-hunterbiden-c-idUSKBN1WI2HK) Trump accused Hunter Biden of taking a massive corrupt payoff from China, which is usually a signal that he took a massive corrupt payoff from China because he basically only accuses his enemies of his own crimes.
cf.
Nameless Voice on 22/10/2020 at 12:55
The thing about conspiracy theories is that they nearly always have a grain of truth in them.
The best lies are always close to the truth.
Conspiracy theories work because we know that there are real conspiracies, and because the issues that they attempt to explain are real - even if their conclusions are blatantly wrong or ridiculous.
The definition of a conspiracy, at its most basic, is some people (usually wielding some kind of power) conspiring in secret for their own advantage, generally to the detriment of others. That's happening all the time, every day, on smaller scales. A lobbyist bribing a politician to enact laws which favour their company at the cost of the citizens, telecoms companies engaging in price fixing, a social media platform intentionally defrauding children, etc.
People know, to some extent, that these kind of small-scale conspiracies are real, so they extrapolate that there must also be bigger and/or crazier conspiracies that are just better-hidden.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of real problems with society. People live in poverty, jobs don't pay well, there's a lack of good housing, the newspapers are dishonest and have their own agendas, etc.
People know the problems exist, and know that some conspiracies exist, so they put the two together incorrectly and come to the wrong conclusions.
It doesn't help that a major tactic of the far right and especially the alt-right is to take a valid societal problem, switch around who they say is responsible for it, and then try to pass it off as fact.
People aren't paid well, but instead of that being because big businesses have too much power and there being no unions, they blame it on immigrants taking the jobs.
Non-white people tend to get arrested more, but instead of that being the fault of a systemically racist justice system combined with systems to push non-white people into desperate poverty, they instead accuse all non-white people of having violent criminality in their nature.
Many have no access to good housing, but instead of blaming that on private companies trying to extort as much rent as they can possibly get away with, and no rent control laws, they blame it on social welfare scroungers taking the social homes. (If you even have social homes in the USA...?)
News platforms are biased, but rather than them mostly being staunch defenders of the establishment, the status quo, and everything which is wrong with society, they instead accuse them of spreading crazy communist lies designed to tear down all the good parts of society.
It's obviously wrong, but it has just enough elements of the truth to seem plausible.
Take a real problem, often caused by you; twist it around and claim that your opponents are responsible, and that it's all a conspiracy.
It's a quick way to take gullible people who should really be your opponents and tricking them into becoming your supporters.
