this is a :a-guy: post
So my grandma couldn't live alone anymore and she moved into my parents house about a year ago. Her new bedroom doesn't have cable. Her media diet used to be like 90% TV and 10% internet. Now it's reversed.
She's 90 years old and just a conventional methodist.
What probably happened is she searched youtube for gospel music to do crosswords by. 100,000 iterations of the algorithm later she believes in ancient aliens, crises actors, millenarianism, all of it.
Same thing probably happened in rural communities who got the full internet all at once. They didn't get it by degrees, dial-up alta vista, to learn years of bullshit filtering heuristics.
It happened the second smartphones became widely available. I watched it happen. My relatives had only heard of the internet as some hypothetical thing and never did much other than email people at work. Then they got iphones in like 2008 and 09. It was like a speedrun of the last 50 years of conspiracy theories directly into their brains like Neo downloading kungfu. Now they're all deeply into Qanon
I guess the question is if the internet is inherently poison to someone who hasn't built up resistance or if the American brain is already primed for gibberish conspiracies. I guess both.
Yeah as much as I'm grateful that the internet got me into leftism, but damn if I didn't have to go through some weird fucking ideologies to get there. Would have been much healthier to just have met a DSA or SAlt member IRL
Same thing happened to my mom, went from at worst an old school (as in pre-Jenny McCarthy and that british doctor) antivaxxer but at least kind of leftist, all the way down the new age to qanon pipeline and now shares fascist facebook memes.
It’s sad how reactionaries will seize on otherwise good but uninformed people with some highly specific stance (ie. antivax) and appeal to that to sucker them into blindly supporting all of their other reactionary stances. I’ve seen so many people get plucked away like this
reactionaries can do this because none of their worldview has to be coherent or make sense. It just has to distract and confuse but feel like something real. It's like a squid shooting ink everywhere to escape predators.
I'm reminded of that one Qanon Anonymous podcast where they read an FBI transcript of a January 6th rioter guy talking to the feds. The guy could only barely describe why he was at the riot and often seemed to get lost when describing his own worldview, uncontested. He couldn't remember Vincent Fusca's name or why he was supposed to be JFK Jr. And this guy was at the front of the line wearing a Q shirt. Not to say everyone has to be able to describe what they believe in intricate detail, but should at least know why they're doing something.
"The internet will rot your mind" was always projection from the older generation.
It's strange, my dad also did a similar switch from mostly consuming TV content to youtube, but the algorithm has fed him UFO stuff and a weird earthquake prediction guy. No fash rabbit hole. My theory is that the algorithm doesn't go down the fash rabbithole where I live since I consume a bit of political content on YT but never get Ben Shapiro and the others in my feed.
I have probably watched literal days of videos about doing communism on YouTube and the closest thing I've ever gotten to a right wing video recommendation was a PragerU ad - and I have personalized ads turned off.
all roads lead to PBS Spacetime for me. I can't avoid it. I will remove it from my homescreen entirely. Ban it and any other space-related channels. And then 2 weeks later it's back like a cockroach infestation.
I've had a few of their vids show up on my recommended, I click on them because I want to pretend to know what a muon is, but 2 minutes in and I have literally no clue what the bearded guy is talking about.
See, I watched some video about... I cant even remember what it was, but it had something to do with some evolutionary process. Immediate recommendations were all videos about how evolution is a lie and creationism is real. The video i watched was not a creationist video. Like wtf it was actually scary to me because I was like, is this what happens to people? I don't really follow youtube recommendations much anyway, I usually search for videos directly
No lol I was on incognito mode also but idk if that makes any difference
Were you on a shared network/proxy with a creationist by any chance? I think that'll do it.
We're not exactly inviting to newcomers
And we don't validate a lot of preexisting beliefs
Junk food is easier to make, distribute and consume than our succulent leftist meals.
Capitalists have nothing to lose from radicalizing people to the far right, but they have a lot to lose from doing the opposite.
True, but if people were being hit by the commie brain ray at the same rate YT is currently radicalizing people to the right, I'm sure the company would step in to correct it.
It's easier to consume comforting nonsense that's closer to your gut feelings than to be told truthful, boring things about why everything's fucked.
But they end up believing everything is fuckwd because of the gay reptilian jews
Every single time I suddenly realized I was hanging out with (what I would later learn was) the alt right in college it was after months of being recruited, pursued, flattered before they even considered showing their power level. If there is a purity test it must come much later.
In contrast every single time I've tried to join a group or organization that identified as leftist they are just openly hostile from the jump. I've given up on joining an organization at this point.
And I can almost guarantee at least one person will read this and blame me somehow. Which just proves my point.
Welcome to the Internet, we have two items on the menu:
- Insane right wing conspiracy theories
- Severe anxiety and depression
Take your pick
I wrote a much longer post but that’s what it boils down to really I think. At least with an Internet that exists for private profit, and so must drive ‘engagement’ as much as possible in order to sell ads.
Makes ya wonder if the human brain just isn’t cut out for something like the internet. Our natural human inclination to try to make sense of the world and our need for social interaction get subverted for profit
Makes ya wonder if the human brain just isn’t cut out for something like the internet.
Our natural human inclination to try to make sense of to make sense of the world and our need for social interaction get subverted for profit
profit
:soviet-hmm:
Same thing probably happened in rural communities who got the full internet all at once. They didn’t get it by degrees, dial-up alta vista, to learn years of bullshit filtering heuristics.
Just for the record, this isn’t how rural internet works. We didn’t go from nothing to fiber. We got the same internet services everyone else did on a 5-20 year delay depending on where you’re at
I'm simple mountain folk so I saw it happen. It takes us longer to go from dial up to dsl and when we did graduate, we graduated into an internet close to its final form. City folk graduated into 2005 internet. (I said it entirely the wrong way in the OP. They didn't get it smoothly)
Every year of delay in getting hooked in have the internet more and more time to become worse and crazier and more controlled
True, I got sucked in and now I believe communism is inevitable :sicko-luna:
Like and subscribe and don't forget to hit that bell on this innocuous video about celebrities to get nothing but alt-right pipeline directly into your feed for the next 6 of your formative years
on a small personal scale I wonder how hard it would be to set up "parental control" for shit like this. idk if it would be possible to do without outright blocking things like facebook. Either that or try to pre-seed their accounts with a bunch of lefty shit to confuse The Algorithm
yeah we talked about like clearing her history, resetting her algorithm, and nudging it in a direction with some wholesome search terms.
and she's 90 years old so she less than half way understands what the new world order theory is but latches on to key words that she's heard before like "Revelations".
https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/redirect-a-url-on-windows-10/
I noticed my boomer mom fell into the CNN/corporate democrat rabbit hole a while ago. It's interesting how this basically coincided with her finally joining Facebook. I also wonder how my dad's political beliefs would be right now if he was still kickin'
just manipulate the allgorithm ,yourself ... "curate"
Are you joking? When I'm 90 I'm going to be the most annoying member of the local commie group and use my age to socially pressure people into letting me interrupt to me rant about what organizing was like before the Skynet metaverse and the mandated Soylent diet.
