Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
I'm not saying those trends charts demonstrate anything, just that commercial human astro-turfers or bot networks are no less of a thing than intelligence ones and it wouldn't really be a conspiracy theory to think McDonalds or any other company, trade association, lobbyist, PR firm etc, is operating a lot of social media accounts that could theoretically show up on a report like that if they were doing a lot of it from a specific place.
You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.
OP has just completely pulled this analysis out of their ass. They aren’t all constantly running g cyber operations on Reddit, that bears zero resemblance to what cyber operations look like in real life including the point that you raised.
Daily reminder (for myself especially) to engage as little with social media (reading/commenting) as possible. It's a huge waste of time anyways not like I don't have better things to do.
This is a special addiction because most of us are community starved. Formative years were spent realizing we could form digital communities, then right when they were starting to become healthy and pay us back, they got hijacked by parasites.
These parasites have always dreamed of directly controlling our communities, and it got handed to them on a silver platter.
Corporate, monetized community centers with direct access to our mindshare, full ability to censor and manipulate, and direct access to our community-centric neurons. It is a dream come true for these slavers which evoke a host of expletives in my mind.
Human beings are addicted to community social interaction. It is normally a healthy addiction. It is not any longer in service of us.
The short term solution: reduce reliance on and consumption of corporate captured social media
The long term solution: rebuild local communities, invest time in p2p technology that outperforms centralized tech
When I say "p2p" I do not mean what is currently available. Matrix, federated services, etc are not it. I am talking about going beyond even Apple in usability, and beyond BitTorrent in decentralization. I am talking about a meta-substrate so compelling to developers and so effortless to users that it makes the old ways appear archaic in their use. That is the long term vision.
