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by BizarroLand 829 days ago
That article (http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wi...) is a perfect example of radicalizing material.

It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!"

And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?"

Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail.

Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG!

(trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) )

Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators!

And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that.

How can you tolerate this injustice!?!

___________________________________________________________________________

And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible.

But then you look at the rest of the website:

http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?)

And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity.

And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl.

You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn.

Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.
1 comments
shuntress 829 days ago
> no ssl certificate because?

This is way beside the point but there is nothing inherently wrong with unsecured plain http traffic if you aren't accepting user information over that connection (such as a name/password, auth token or whatever).

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BizarroLand 829 days ago
True, but based on the remainder of the page, my guess is that they found some correlation between SSL and the Mark of the Beast or the New World Order or some other craziness.
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panopticon 829 days ago
SSL also protects against certain classes of third party snooping and injection. It's nice knowing that every piece of networking gear between me and the server doesn't know what I'm reading. Hell, I've seen ISPs inject ads into non-secure pages.

There are also networking policies that prevent non-https connections, so you could be accidentally blocking out users on a strictly managed device.

link