[jollybean]

There are TikTokers with a lot of influence promulgating it from their basements.

The vast number of commentators seem to be taking the insanity at face value. A lot of comments like 'Wow, that's an interesting perspective' of 'I've never heard that, they don't teach us everything in school'.

While I'm not worried about that meme, it's just shocking to see how easy it is to delude people.

Combined with the Pew polling showing young people don't really get their news from normative sources, it's a bit worrying. Cable news is all Senior Citizens while Gen Z is off on Twitch and TikTok.

[jacquesm]

> While I'm not worried about that meme, it's just shocking to see how easy it is to delude people.

You can see evidence of that sort of thing in every online community, even right here on Hacker News. No community is immune from being weaponized to spread outright nonsense. The question is what you can do about it.

[atdrummond]

1. The creator pushing this is Momlennial (Donna). She’s almost certainly not meaning for her content to be taken seriously.

2. Even if she was serious, the reaction amongst most users has been extremely incredulous and negative. Her follower count has stalled/slipped and the various anthropology/history/other social science creators have had a great time debunking her.

3. If you’re not seeing the negative assessments of her content in her interactions, it’s due to how she handles contradicting comments and duets/stitches.

[ConceptJunkie]

> Cable news is all Senior Citizens while Gen Z is off on Twitch and TikTok

Both of those are garbage sources. It's a lateral move, in my opinion.

[jollybean]

Cable news reports on the news of the day and generally doesn't lie, rather, they misrepresent.

TikTok, Reddit etc. is mostly just fantasy, opinion.

Older people are much better informed about current issues.

[tsol]

Cable news has at least some standards they're forced to adhere to. There are some strange, worrying, and literally insane subreddits out there. TikTok is it's own minefield as well

[jollybean]

Totally agree, but the net misrepresentation, or strong editorialization from Cable News may actually be more damaging that the perverse stuff on Reddit.

Watching the Kyle Rittenhouse coverage, pre-trial, from Fox and MSNBC was like watching the Soviets and Americans combat each other with propaganda.

Actually watching the trial and the information as it came out felt truly enlightening.

My view is that the press 'narratives', even if they technically 'do not lie' (i.e. standards) are more damaging than for example, QAnon or Flat Earth.

We are being told what to believe and I think this has a much stronger effect than we realize, because it even works on people who are pretty smart. Self Awareness takes effort to accept that there is bias, to really open one's mind, to search for uncomfortable facts, to accept them at face value, and then to think about it outside the concept of some accepted ideology or worldview, and the social/group pressures that apply. It's just too easy to be influenced by talking heads.

[tsol]

>My view is that the press 'narratives', even if they technically 'do not lie' (i.e. standards) are more damaging than for example, QAnon

I would disagree here. We are being told what to believe but that's nothing new, just look at how much press coverage minority issues got 100 years ago. Qanon, on the other hand, isn't misrepresentation but outright misinformation that turns some into outright insane conspiracy theorists believing JFK Jr is returning from the grave.

And one of the more insane subreddits, I got linked from a nursing subreddit, is a "penectomy" subreddit for people who want to remove their members, not because of gender dysphoria, but because of a sexual fetish. I regret to say there were pictures as well. That's straight up mental illness, but it's got a whole community to validate peoples delusions. The power to normalize is as worrying as the power to fashion a narrative. It's more than political, it encompasses everything.

Anyone who's been on /b/ can tell you, while the media is awful, places where CP is so common there are memes about it represent another level entirely. In a sense that's being told what to believe through social concensus. It'd sound insane to say one of the most popular websites in the early 2000s regularly had CP posted but it's okay because that's just free speech. Unless you've been there, which many people here have, in which case it becomes normalized and just "one of those bad things that happens regardless of policing". That's so much more worrying to me than governments and the media trying to control information as they always have.

[AnimalMuppet]

Yes, but TikTok is even more fragmented than cable news, with far more varieties of insane nonsense.