this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Which should tell us that access to information wasn't the problem.
Personally, I think the problem is that the internet allows the worst of humanity to congregate in a virtual space. The sort of people who would have felt completely alone with their "political opinions" (usually involving literal murder) before the internet – because they're such horrifying pieces of shit that nobody wanted anything to do with them – can now find likeminded human garbage online, and feel like their opinions are actually common, acceptable and mainstream. Couple that with the ability to spread disinformation as efficiently as information, and you end up where we are now. There's a reason why so many mass murderers have gotten their "education" on online forums like the various chans. And this isn't even getting into using machine learning to influence peoples' opinions like what corporations Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have provably done already and all in the service of the psychotic conservative agenda, which is a whole 'nother can of worms likely even worse than what we had before.
I unironically think that the internet was a mistake and will be our undoing.
Edit: relevant may-may
I think future historians will also come to the conclusion that a large factor contributing to the current rise of fascism in Western democracies was a very successful hybrid war effort by Putin's Russia.
I mean it's already pretty obvious that European and US fascists have very close ties to Russian agents. Putin is waging a global digital war - combining old propaganda techniques with social media echo chambers - and we're losing hard right now.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree, and the biggest reason Russians have been so successful with their disinformation campaign is the internet.
For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
The internet isn’t bad itself.
It’s the fact that bad actors (rich companies, power hungry people, and especially authoritarian states) can hire millions of people and create millions of bots to intentionally spread their narratives on social media. This is immoral, so good actors don’t do it.
No one talks about the problem or acknowledges it. Social Media needs regulation to prevent this, or it will be our undoing.
We kinda can blame the internet for letting a bot present itself as a human. If secure ID was in the infrastructure, better content. If all value production were rewarded with money and value destruction taxed, even better.
Who gets to define "value production" and "value destruction"?
Also, assuming that the problem is automatons producing false information instead of just regular 'ol fuckwits is, in my view, misguided. A huge chunk of the of bullshit online is probably not produced by automated systems but by actual humans – they may be working for bullshit farms like the Russian "Internet Research Agency", but they're human nonetheless.
Sure, the internet itself isn't bad or good, but human nature being what it is means that this is what we get. Regulating it wouldn't stop shitty humans from finding each other on it
edit: also consider that the worst of humanity are generally the ones with the most power right now; they have no interest in making the internet better