Social media loves nothing better than outrage and controversy. It drives algos and often transforms no-talent schmucks into ‘influencers’. It’s ALSO an easy way to manipulate public opinion.
Especially when you can generate bogus engagement with a few hundred thousand bots.
The old Soviets had a term — ‘useful idiot’. Today’s tech can allow a sophisticated propagandist to mass produce such people to act against their own interests, and champion ideas that would have once seemed laughable. It seems we have NOT yet quite learned those hard lessons from the Pandemic era.
The AI question is the latest example. There are a lot of arguments you could use in making the case ‘for’ or ‘against’ pushing the growth of AI. Economics, national security, jobs impact, environment, and intellectual property are just a few of the hotly contested topics for this issue.
We have recently seen that it is ALSO a new issue which could supersede the some local and state-level races — including red and blue races that traditionally prioritize more traditional party distinctions.
With an unusually narrow balance of power, and some of America’s enemies known history of favouring the party that’s increasingly sympathetic to their communist ideals, it’s a good idea to take a minute to step back from those fights and see which of them come from deeply held convictions based on real information and propaganda used to either cause strife, change elections, or (worse still) move policy in a direction our rivals would prefer us to take.
How big a difference could these manipulators make?
Well, we now live in a world where Charlie Kirk’s widow is being blamed for his assassination, people are claiming the Butler Pennsylvania shooting (with an actual fatal shot fired) was ‘staged’, that a woman who confessed to strangling her own children to death was innocent, and that wrote a musical to celebrate the life of a guy who just confessed to shooting a Health Care executive in the back for no other reason than being in the wrong line of work.
As user AGHamilton said in a follow-up quote tweet:
Keep this in mind when you see posts with tens of thousands of likes that happen to fit with the information war positions of certain adversaries.
You think this is the only CCP bot farm? Any idea how many Iranian/Pakistani/Russian active bot farms currently exist on here and other platforms?
Even the ‘likes’ themselves are weaponized as social proof.
If someone sees that 3 people agree with an outlandish statement? It’s easily dismissed as being crackpot. But when folks who are NOT so discerning come across an outlandish statement with 30,000 people agreeing to it? Especially with Gish Galloping claim-upon-claim lies made with the absolute certainty of a total psychopath? It leaves the user wondering if maybe they really DO “see something” the rest of us are missing.
And before you know it, they’ve fallen a rabbit hole. And why is that hole hard to get out of? It would require admitting (even to yourself) that you were fool enough to fall for ridiculous lies in the first place. And the longer you’ve held onto it, the more deeply such an admission of stupid credulity hurts the ego.
It’s hardly the first time the CCP and before them, the Soviets, have used our freedoms against us. They’ve used various protest groups to block growth and advancement of various kinds, used peace movements to sway public opinion in foreign policy, and have use racial divisions to generally destabilize things.
Pick whatever side of the debate you think best. Just make sure you are doing it because of your own authentic beliefs, and NOT because you’ve been ‘nudged‘ into a position that was made, not of your own will, but that of the person who ‘nudged’ you.
We realized too late in the game that governments were playing a dirty game in COVID, weaponizing information to control their own citizens against their will to make the ‘right’ choices.
Let your voice be heard.
Just make entirely sure it’s your own ideas that come out when you speak up. And if you find yourself parroting the same ideas of those who hate your country…?
Take as long as you need to stop and recalibrate. It costs you nothing to recheck your assumptions. But as we’ve already learned, NOT checking them can lead to a world of trouble.
In related news… the lessons learned in COVID are just as true today.
Only the issues we’re squabbling over have changed…
Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap
by Doug Giles
Beginning in March 2020, many Christians went into lockdown-freak-out mode. Uncut, irrational, unbiblical, and not to mention, unconstitutional, fear gripped many churches and church leaders. Forced to choose between obeying the Word of God or the edict of man, most Western Churches buckled. We even saw it here in First Amendment-protected America.
The Apostle Peter buckled to fear on the night of Christ’s crucifixion. But he learned his lesson and lived the rest of his life bold as a lion. How can the church ‘go and do likewise’?
Read the book and find out!
Get your copy of Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap now. Better yet, grab an extra copy for any petrified pastor who dutifully put obedience to the unconstitutional edicts of Mayor McCheese ahead of obedience to the explicit commandments of the LORD God Almighty.
