You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

Source: You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online.  But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you — individually– angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners — especially young ones — to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

The best part? The very best part? Reddit is one of the biggest parts of the problem, and I don’t see anyone in the comments with either that realization, or the guts to say it. The site got used like a 3-dollar whore in the run-up to the 2016 election, in favor of Trump. Then they “fixed” that algorithm problem, and now the entire front page is almost always filled with posts about people being awful to one another, in various forms. It’s ALL hatred towards “others.” It’s ALL moral superiority over someone else. Just zoom out and look at it without being logged in. It’s kind of like junior high, but way, way worse.

Reddit Knows Programmers

I “use” Reddit to look at subs for ESO and Fallout 76. That’s it. When I’m bored, I sometimes click over to the “popular” tab, and just have a look. It’s more of an anthropological experiment than an interest in reading what’s there. Sometimes, I can’t get past the front page, because, most of the time, Reddit is just a living monument to people being awful to each other. Sometimes, I make it to the next page. Sometimes, I make it to a gem. Most of the time, I see Reddit’s twenty-something, white, middle-class, male, under-sexed, under-employed hive mind on full display, like this.

“He,” here, refers to Elon Musk.

Reddit. ‘Nuff said.

This guy thinks “backend and fullstack” programmers “know shit about OSes and PC in general.” And, as of 13 hours of being posted, deep in the thread, has 84 upvotes. (On a post with 2200+ votes.)

I’ve been programming since I was 12, on a Vic-20. I’ve been doing it professionally my entire career, for about 30 years now. Even the people who I would consider “casual” programmers know how operating systems and PC’s work. I’ve met some posers, but they wash out. To blithely say “most” programmers “don’t understand computers” is utter nonsense, and, frankly, weapons-grade cope.

Welcome to Reddit, I guess. “Enjoy” your stay.

Reddit just made a deal to sell their “content” to Google, to train AI. Good luck with that. With what we’ve seen over the past few days with their AI product, using Reddit seems like a really good fit.

I weep for the future.

Me and My Impertinent Questions

That’s apparently what I get for calling him on conflating two very controversial, yet very different issues, and asking why he would do that. It’s too bad. I mean, I know we have different politics, but he’s a great writer with a lot to say, and he’s smack-dab on the money about the corporate “enshittification” of every online service, and, indeed, every business in America these days. On the other hand, he’s one of the charter members of the he-man Musk haters club, and says he’ll be “leaving” Twitter soon, so I guess I’ll have a chance to get blocked on Mastodon or something in the future.

Twitter, in a Nutshell

Some mid account, posting a summary, of a news article, which says specifically the opposite of what he’s saying in the tweet…. 21.2K likes. The truth? Doesn’t even register. But it’s red meat for his audience, so…

Where’s Elon’s vaunted community fact-checking service on this one?

The “news”

There really isn’t a way to fix this on this platform. Maybe not on social media at all. But I’m going to start muting a lot more accounts in a last-ditch effort to make this platform useful to me.

Twitter Reprieve; News Holiday

I deleted Twitter a couple weeks ago, and have been playing Fallout 76 in the mornings, when I often would have had the news on, while I caffeinate. I have no idea what’s going on in the world now. The only tidbits I get are through sites like 9gag, and most of that is about Ukraine, which I just skip over like it was religious nonsense. I just thought, wow, I’m so at peace! What’s differ… Oh yeah, right.

So I just checked Drudge and Fox News, and find I haven’t missed it at all. I don’t know why I’m supposed to care who any of those people on the front page are, and there’s no reason to figure it out, except to get back on social media, and scream into the void about it.

I keep thinking that I could use Twitter, but avoid everyone that talks about politics, and only follow, like, comedians and novelty accounts, but I use it to rant and rave at companies all the time, and that’s not changing anything, except making me feel terrible. I don’t know if I will cave and try this, but I think I have a couple more weeks to feel this out.

Why THIS Guy?

Yet Again

You can read the facts of this case through a simple search. Surprise, surprise: They may not be as clear and straightforward as you might think, from this copy. You can see what the prosecution wanted versus what he got. You can make whatever judgement you like about him, his victim, and the legal system.

I don’t particularly care about any of that. At least, not any more.

It’s been six years since this happened. Yet every other month, this guy’s face gets reposted to 9gag, Imgur, and Facebook, et. al, and dragged through the mud again. You may think he deserves this treatment. You may think it’s a picture-perfect case of white privilege, or rich privilege, or rich, white privilege. You may think he never deserves to be forgotten. You might be right, but don’t forget that the legal ramifications of being on the sexual offender registry will follow him the rest of his days, and they are no joke.

According to one site’s statistics, there are presently 463,634 cases of sexual assault per year in the US. In the six years since this case, that’s roughly 2.5 million cases. So my question is: why this guy? Why is this case reposted every few months on every social media site I visit? If you were to trawl through the 2.5M sexual assault cases since this happened, I absolutely, 100%, money-back guarantee that you will find at least one other case that demonstrates presumed privilege better than this.

This particular post was lifted from 9gag. Several of the comments demonstrate the same frustration I have. I once saw it reposted by a friend on Facebook, and asked: why? He came back with, “If it happened to your daughter, wouldn’t you do the same?” And I said, “Maybe, but this wasn’t your daughter either. Why do you feel the need to repost it?” He didn’t have a good answer.

So what’s going on here? It’s weird. Is this being done by the victim? Friends and family of the victim? Is someone getting paid to do it? In this particular case, the account that posted this to 9gag tags all of his posts with “decolonize.” Is it a sockpuppet for foreign agitators? I honestly don’t know, but I’m starting to think there’s a story here. Normal, rational people would have let this go by now.

Critical Ignorance of How Things Work

Whar Money?

On this news, one highly-upvoted person at 9gag had this to say:

Critical Ignorance

“The only person screwed was insurance companies.”

elonmustnt

Where does this person think that insurance companies get their money? How do they not understand that people pay what-are-called premiums for that coverage? How do they not understand that the insurance companies will pass increased prices on to their customers in the form of increased premiums? Even if they are employed with insurance, and never look at their pay stub, how do they not understand that employers covering only some of the costs of these premiums eventually pass increases on to employees, both in terms of raising their contribution, and by paying people less?

And lest you think this was brutally-ignorant take was isolated, there’s another, even more highly-upvoted post further down the comment section, with lots of replies, none of which correct this fundamental disconnect with the basic, underlying mechanism of good, old fashioned capitalism. Apparently everyone on 9gag is content with the explanation that the insurance companies were the only ones getting screwed by Shkreli, and they view his move as some sort of inverse, anarcho-capitalist Robin Hood maneuver. It’s almost insane.

I guess the question is: What did I expect from a post titled “Justice Served?” as if there were a popular misunderstanding of what was actually happening here. One comment gets at the truth: Shkreli is being made an example of, in order to send a signal to other people who make waves for Big Pharma. Yes, of course, every other pharma CEO wants to do what he did, but you have to do it quietly. Slowly. Like a frog being boiled alive. You can’t make moves so big or fast that they cannot be ignored.

It’s little wonder how we can’t find common ground in our politics today. People can post a critical misunderstanding of how something works to a top-10 web site, find validation from scores of like-minded people, and come away thinking that they’ve really got a handle on how the world works.

These are the people that political operatives are targeting with disinformation campaigns. The rubes that got snookered by the Cambridge Analytica election campaign for Trump? This is them. And they vote, thinking that they have “done their research,” and have insight into how the world really works.

I weep for the future. If there is one.

Be Careful What You Search For

I saw a post on Imgur that said that Little Cesar’s was going to raise the price of its “Hot and Ready” pizzas, so I wanted to go to Twitter, find an original reference, so that I could make a snarky comment about how my local shop never has any anyway.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT SEARCH FOR “HOT AND READY” ON TWITTER.

Spoiler alert: It’s all gay porn.

Or do, I’m not the boss of you. Maybe that’s your thing.

Conservative social networks keep making the same mistake

Given the extremely predictable turmoil that emerged from Gettr’s content policies, though, I wonder if there isn’t something to this: a false-flag social network, set up only to watch it burn to the ground.

Source: Conservative social networks keep making the same mistake

In this… post-modern era of the Information Age, how are we ever supposed to actually conclude anything about anything? I’m still scratching my head over the twin scandals of Trump’s supposed “pee tape” — which was a false flag, but reported as true — and Hunter Biden’s “laptop” — which was a real story, but reported as a false flag. By the time the dust finally settled, and the actual facts of these stories have been sorted out, and the clown show of perpetrators and accomplices revealed, we find that the political sides don’t care about the truth anyway. The impressions of those stories are what they took away, and that’s all that mattered to the people who perpetrated them on the American public. Where does that leave us?

At this point, I think it’s becoming clear that one of the most important tools of a false flag operation is, in fact, to weaponize social media and news organizations to fight with each other, to occlude the facts until your disinformation campaign has entrenched enough people in the opinions you want them to have that it doesn’t matter when the truth comes out. By the time it does, they don’t care to learn any more about the stories, you will have had the effect on people you wanted, and while the talking heads are sifting through the rubble, your next operation is already underway. Again, as a society, where does that leave us?

I’m not hopeful, that’s for certain.

Netflix can’t shake Chappelle controversy | TheHill

Netflix can’t seem to close the door on “The Closer,” with the streaming giant only further inflaming controversy with its defense of Dave Chappelle’s mocking of the transgender community in his latest comedy special.

Source: Netflix can’t shake Chappelle controversy | TheHill

This article is a pristine example of what’s wrong with “internet” “news,” and why we, as a society, are so fractured and antagonistic towards each other.

  1. A Netflix co-CEO has responded to the backlash, and, frankly, was unequivocal about their position. The only reason they could be described as not being able to “shake” the controversy is because someone with an axe to grind at The Hill says so in an article designed to… incite more controversy. All links in the article refer back to… more articles at The Hill, and this article adds no new developments to the story.
  2. I watched the special. I worked through the language, and watched it till the end. There are some pointed opinions about gender expressed, which I can understand some people would take umbrage with, in particular. However, what cannot be misconstrued — unless you are specifically trying to misconstrue it — is that the overall message of the special — the entire point of it, in fact — is one of unequivocal support for human beings, no matter what social tribe they identify with. (Except if they’re white, which I actually appreciate in the context of his oeuvre.)

Towards the end, Chappelle makes one of the most compelling and compassionate statements about the modern human condition that I’ve ever heard anyone make, and I have a real problem with people who can’t see past their own prejudices to hear it. Anyone coming away from watching the show with any message other than love towards any minority is purposely trying to leverage selected quotes to gin up hatred towards Chappelle, and cash in on the resulting clicks. In my opinion, this sort of behavior is literally strangling society as we have known it up till now.

UPDATE: Hold up.

“I should have recognized the fact that a group of our employees was really hurting,” Ted Sarandos said in an interview.

Source: Netflix Co-CEO Says He ‘Screwed Up’ When Defending Dave Chappelle Special

$10 says they pull the special within a month. Now that the people decrying the program have seen that they can draw blood in the form of an apology for the reaction to the reaction, they will double down on getting the episode removed from the service.