Why trolls, extremists, and others spread conspiracy theories they don’t believe
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Yeah, but the tools they use to peddle their drivel provide them with a lot of influence. IMHO, this is where Social Media went astray. It might be more correct to label it not as "going astray" and more that this is the inevitable outcome of Social Media. It makes me sad.
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But endless counterspeech is totally viable, just dedicate all of your free time to debunked astroturfed conspiracy therapists backed by multimillion corporations.
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I recently discovered that the voice of Dante from DMC is a 5th Dimensional Transcendant, whatever that means, and an anti-vaxxer. The dichotomy here is that he's losing his job because of his erratic behaviour and doesn't stand to really gain anything as he has a very small following.
I wonder what the mentality is behind those kind of people.
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Back in the day, you know, 20+ years ago, I had fun exploring some of the some of the various fringe theories out there. I had the Illuminatus book trilogy, and it was a fun thought exercise to speculate about how much of it could be truth.
Back then it was all fairly obscure stuff. Most people had never heard of any of it.
It was all fun and games until a critical mass of people somehow discarded all critical thinking and went and swallowed the whole thing and then went on the hunt for more.
You're not supposed to take the joke seriously.
Back then it was all fairly obscure stuff. Most people had never heard of any of it.
It was all fun and games until a critical mass of people somehow discarded all critical thinking and went and swallowed the whole thing and then went on the hunt for more.
You're not supposed to take the joke seriously.
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25 years ago the weirdos in bars could only find an audience for their crazy / racist / conspiracy thoughts with 1 or 2 people at a time. And it went nowhere because it was worth nothing.
Now we have billion dollar social media companies intentionally amplifying and endlessly repeating that same weirdo crap for clicks and profits across 100's of millions of eyeballs daily.
The effect of this over years has converted fringe buffoonery into a political constituency, and hence an effective political strategy leveraged by an unscrupulous few (see: Trump, Marjory Taylor Green, JD Vance, Lauren Boebert, etc). As a politics this approach is worse than worth nothing: it's actively harming our collective ability to solve problems like adults.
We're literally living in a mass reality distortion field because of this stuff. And if we don't just call a spade a spade and end this nonsense, we're very much gonna be a society of neolithic brains and God-like technologies of self-destruction. I don't see that ending well for anyone.
Now we have billion dollar social media companies intentionally amplifying and endlessly repeating that same weirdo crap for clicks and profits across 100's of millions of eyeballs daily.
The effect of this over years has converted fringe buffoonery into a political constituency, and hence an effective political strategy leveraged by an unscrupulous few (see: Trump, Marjory Taylor Green, JD Vance, Lauren Boebert, etc). As a politics this approach is worse than worth nothing: it's actively harming our collective ability to solve problems like adults.
We're literally living in a mass reality distortion field because of this stuff. And if we don't just call a spade a spade and end this nonsense, we're very much gonna be a society of neolithic brains and God-like technologies of self-destruction. I don't see that ending well for anyone.
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One nice thing about having been on Usenet in the mid-90s is that one learned early on that the best way to deal with trolls and griefers was to just plonk them into your killfile.
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I used to enjoy the old Flat Earth/Hollow Earth stuff and the Moon Landing hoaxes. They felt mostly harmless and, in the case of the former with some thought to how it works you could come up with a good D&D campaign world. But they were no longer fun when you look back and realize that almost all conspiracy theories ultimately boil down to "it's da joooooos!"
Edit: Though "Birds aren't real" hasn't revealed itself to be anything more than a fun bit of ribbing, so far.
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A few reasons:
1. they are in love with hate and want to spread it.
2. you can make alot of money spreading lies (see anti vax monsters killing children for money and fame). They just glom onto the reich wing echo chamber which is ready made for conspiracies and grifting.
3. They're paid to do so or are a bot - aka geopolitical reasons. Hi russia/china
1. they are in love with hate and want to spread it.
2. you can make alot of money spreading lies (see anti vax monsters killing children for money and fame). They just glom onto the reich wing echo chamber which is ready made for conspiracies and grifting.
3. They're paid to do so or are a bot - aka geopolitical reasons. Hi russia/china
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Praetorian
So basically, grifters and conmen. Like that sprayon-tan guy, #45.
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Don't say that in a Xitter thread. Some folks there never understood that it was never ever a good place.
My theory of what went wrong on the internet is people stopped seeing it as a place to troll and post cat photos and started seeing it as a place to get their news -- often from peers. It became "serious business". And with that truth has died.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Praetorian
Just because I have a smartphone that now has affordable texting, its not another's right to send me text and images of fake or distorted news about North Carolina flood victims, and details. And this from a family member. I left Facebroke because its a cesspool of liking stupidity, ignorance, hate and lies. Thumbs up their collective arses...
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While I try not to invoke his name too often, I honestly think it's Trump-enabled psychosis. They see how the chuds keep financially supporting him despite him being a lying grifter and assume that by aligning with the chuds they too can get on the gravy train. It worked for some people, but as is the case with most media copycats, those who come later tend to fail to capture the zeitgeist.
It's really weird when otherwise successful people try to do it. Scott Adams was kinda weird before the Trump era, but he could have basically spent the rest of his life living on Dilbert syndication checks had he not posted alt-right buffoonery on his blog.
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uesc_marathon
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I'm old enough to remember in the 90's when Dale Gribble types were treated like kooky but harmless weirdoes, not the people who nearly succeeded in overthrowing my country's government.
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It'll be a joke right up until, like all the others, it's a gateway to more absurdity rather than a reflection of "the meme". Poe will likely come for it, as well. It all remains "put on the makeup, nose, and wig, then you're a clown by any other name" no matter how firmly held your "real" beliefs are. Today, it's still a meme in this circle. Can you be sure it's not already a full-blown conspiracy in another circle? On wider-base social media, is it still signaling what you think?
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Damn the Illuminati, they've done a shit job of secretly running the world.
The Freemasons ran a tight shop and never would've let the world come to this!
(truth be told, I don't know anything about the illuminati, but the Freemasons actually seem pretty nice for the most part)
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
I suspect a large Venn diagram overlap with folks who sign up for the Scientology gig, or those who buy healing crystals.
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pretty much all Trump supporters....which is redundant to your comment.
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When I was in high school and college, it all seemed like fun and games.
The the realization crept in that not only are there some people stupid enough to actually believe this stuff, but they vote based on that belief. And each one of them has a vote that counts just as much as mine.
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There was a judge in California that needs to be impeached and disbarred for stating this when ruling in favor of that one bad Harris deepfake video maker with no sense of humor.
There is nothing in any law that says bad speech must be drowned out with more speech, not even the First Amendment. It's a bad faith fascist tell when someone uses that rationale against disinformation.
You do need to financially punish trolls and make it more difficult for them to earn a living, either by posting disinformation or honestly, but that approach doesn't generally scale (and when it does you still get China which remains in the throes of its fascists)
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It's not just social media, if you go through the comments on Linkedin there are just as many conspiracies and outright lies as there are on tik tok and reels. Linkedin is a hotbed of trolls.
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I have to be honest here, once we get to those conspiracy theories that are so obviously wrong that they rarely deserve the respect of being properly debunked (incl. flat earth); you're firmly in the territory where the specific theory doesn't actually matter and is effectively interchangeable with any falsehood and intellectual babbling.
A better way to put it, if someone genuinely believes in flat earth or that birds aren't real, I'm pretty sure they would've latched onto any conspiracy theory in its place, and it might even be better for everyone that they latch onto theories so absurdly impossible that they can't make their way into actual politics or have meaningful effect in politics. (Though, this might be a lack of creativity on my end when it comes to thinking up ways that flat-earth and birds-aren't-real policies can be meaningfully implemented.)
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Social media is a cancer because humans are a cancer. Social media is just a mechanism for amplifying communication.
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Exactly. When we've so dramatically improved the tools that bad faith actors have, with AI-generated troll accounts ("ignore/disregard all previous instructions" comes to mind) and corporate-or-state-funded disinformation campaigns, pretending "more speech" is the solution is at best sticking our heads in the sand, and more likely just an attempt to take the easy path and ignore the problem inherent in our refusal to regulate speech in any meaningful way. No, I don't believe the framers of the United States Constitution thought that it was necessary for the functioning of a free society for conspiracy theorists, attention-seekers, and the wealthy to be able to flood the conversation with so much shit that nothing else can be talked about. We should stop pretending otherwise.
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Nice try to convince me it's not real, but I know that there's still just one more thing we need to find when moving the secret truck by the SS Anne and we will be able to find a Mew in a pokeball under it. Why else would it be there, Ars? WHY?
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