[Applejinx]

As a twitter user, you'd damn well better expect all this.

The difference between this revolution in social media influencing, and previous revolutions in social media influencing seized and used for fascism such as the use of new radio preceding WWII, is this:

With radio, you were told things by a trusted stranger and believed them because it was on the radio and, thus, news.

Now, you are told things by what is apparently the personal friend of your personal friend, 'privately'. And you believe them because it is real. Your friend said so. Sort of.

It's an advance in propaganda technology for SURE. I don't know where it goes, but it's not like humanity hasn't had to weather this sort of thing before. The parallels are completely obvious, historically. It is nothing more than recontextualizing how to get information past critical questioning, and it's just as effective as the first radio was in its day.

[didibus]

So Twitter should do nothing about it and even make it easier for people to sign up to be for-hire parrots ? And we just all stop complaining about it ?

[Applejinx]

Twitter doing nothing about it and making it easy for people to sign up to be sockpuppets is part of what defines what it is to be Twitter. It's maximizing for a certain kind of thing.

Facebook has strongly different intentions: it is aggressive about wanting to tie single identifiable accounts to single identifiable real people, and wouldn't like the Twitter-nature one bit. Facebook's purpose is to do that, and then make it easier for people to pay money to propagandize exactly whatever people you can define as most vulnerable, for any reason you like, no questions asked. That's Facebook-nature. You can be pretty sure an individual person there is a single, real actual human, and also that you can sell preselected groups of them on anything you want them to believe.

I like that people are complaining about it, don't get me wrong. I think it's pretty clear at what point all this becomes a problem: if it isn't clear already, it will become clearer within ten years, guaranteed, and humanity may or may not survive the result. Complaining is GOOD.

I'm just saying, the reason these social media giants are as huge as they are IS because of their natures. Twitter will not go against Twitter-nature. Facebook will not go against Facebook-nature.