So I noticed something fun about FB... when I go to just normal posts and groups, the messages people are leaving—surprise—are sane reactions or side commentary adjacent to the state of the world and what had happened, etc. There's nothing stigmatized about it. It's very expected. Not a single lunatic to be found.
However, the gamer/anime pages... I have been noticing this a predictable trend for quite some time. (They keep popping up in my feed even though I click them away )
At this point I'm questioning their intelligence level. It's been a few years, but the human on the bottom right is very much the "good guy" for what I guess would be called today the "disenfranchised". His whole entire adventure is based around him more or less fighting tyranny and oppression without going corrupt himself. It being a Japanese game (97'), I'm fairly certain they weren't thinking at all about gendered race wars and other pedantic culture war **** while it was being developed.
This isn't an actual quote in the game, but I just find it so ironic some are so very concerned about the misuse of words and misconstrued logic. And yet it's becoming increasingly clear to me the people largely driving this crap are dumbasses who spend way too much time in their basement modifying reality to nurse a unique martyr complex loosely based around some political agenda. Imagine taking a decades old game and trying to make it fit within the scope of today's politics. If you're a historian today, how do you wrap your head around this phenomenon?
The pages with normal hobbies and topics are not attracting this behavior. However, go to the anime & game-y pages and they all seem to be no go zones because full of propaganda and people with weird behavioral complexes reacting in a butthurt manner. Are these people just spend way that much time consuming media that their brains are warped? Is this why they're so stupid??
The problem with the algorithms is that they're shoving this crap at everyone despite whatever their purpose of being on that website actually is.
It's the exact same on X but from the other end of the political spectrum. It's clear those people consume way too much news and are constantly looking for details and information to twist and turn into some kind of culture war garbage. It's no wonder people why some are being "radicalized" if they're rapidly being exposed to these divisions within minutes of logging in this way daily. Especially when it's targeting our young.
In the late 90s when computers/internet usage was coming into wide use, we banned chatrooms and chatservers over liability problems because the terminally online crazies took them over and behaved in the same sociopathic ways: doxing, abusive posts, stalking, harassment campaigns, etc. This became untenable and because they became a breeding ground for abuse and a safety issue for children, they were closed. Now we let these elements dictate and manage the political discourse around our most precious institutions. Is it really a surprise we've gone the way we have with this at the helm?
I'm thinking I'll check and see what is going on with legislation. Maybe even write and suggest changes, because as it is platforms are incentivized to cater to internet addiction. While we can't do anything about stupidity, we really should think about how we can go about preventing it from having such an outsized influence on our political discourse.
Maybe there's some perfect solution to be had for many of the topics at the forefront.. but I wouldn't know that as a casual observer, because the system as it's currently designed solely caters to appeasing and keeping amused the most gullible and socially bereft in our society. (Sorry for the language, but just trying to get my actual sentiment across)
google and MS have been directing attention in the direction they want for decades now. If you look at any recent google or MS product announcements for any product, they are 100% cringe fests (at least to me) I can't believe that they resonate with american viewers either
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