One of the most valuable long-form posts I have seen in the past year was a few days ago, about the absolute dangers of reddit and other social media sites due to nation-state disinformation. Ironic.
"You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed."
(Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad revenue).
There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and influencers.
Related video I saw yesterday: TikTok is a Cyberweapon[0].
I don't love the way he presented the idea, a bit handwavey and not properly acknowledging the fact that TikTok is only different from other socials because it's a) very good algorithm-wise, and b) Chinese. But the demo of how one would astroturf a protest was very convincing. He should have just done it, it would have been groundbreaking.
Agreed. It's a problem across the board. Insta can do the same thing. It's just that one is US agitprop, one is Chinese.
We need to train our friends and citizens on how to be effective at changing the world around them and at communicating, and how not to let social media influence them directly.
Sadly, the people who are otherwise smart who I know are further left totally reject mainstream media as "complicit in US government crimes" and so on.
"You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed."
https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_t...
(Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad revenue).
There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and influencers.