| "To me, those Youtube videos are symptoms that some weird shit brewing in our society and this news is just flares of this symptom." Yeah. This has been brewing for a long time, going at least as far back as Reagan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." But it has become way worse in recent years, with Trump using extreme fearmongering as a political tactic, Covid radicalizing people further, and social networks creating echo chambers that drive their users literally insane. People have been talking about FEMA death camps and similar stuff for so long that there are now people who genuinely think the government is using natural disasters as an excuse to somehow attack them (or that they create these natural disasters in the first place). Some of the people who think this are actually part of the government! It is not surprising that there are physical threats to people who are out there trying to help. This is absolutely bonkers. We can't continue like this as a society. Algorithm-driven social networks have made free speech an attack vector against free democracies, and if we don't figure out how to recover from this, we're screwed. But I have no idea how to even begin to fix this. Maybe if bots continue turning social networks into dead wastelands, people will leave them and go touch grass instead of sharing crazy conspiracy theories and shrimp Jesuses on Facebook. One can hope. |