How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way?
How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way?
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One of my closer friends is on a weird path atm. He's full into Russian propaganda, anti-western stuff, flat earth, anti vaxx and whatnot.
I tried to reason with him. Turns out he doesn't even know how to verify something he's read online. Check sources? Nope. Google something you've seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
I came to accept that he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation, propaganda and lies.
Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
Those are hardly panacea, as you need a reliable frame of reference for verification.
I remember during the heyday of WikiLeaks, how conservatives and liberals alike dismissed the info dumps as misinformation and edited images/video. You couldn't talk about PRISM with anyone over 40, because all the Cable News outlets were claiming it had been debunked. You couldn't talk about Collateral Murder because it was endlessly getting blocked on social media as "disinformation".
And that was before the advent of AI generated images and whole books churned out with LLMs. What do you say to the guy who is hip deep in "evidence" from the Heritage Foundation? What do you say to a TERF quoting from the Cass Report? What happens when you get a rebuttal in the form of a Tucker Carlson Interview from Moscow?
Yeah, you can just wave that off as "Fake News, doesn't count". But then so can they, and we're back to Square One on validating any kind of underlying truth.
he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation
None of us are immune to propaganda. Thinking this is a matter of simple intelligence is the first trap you fall into when evaluating a source.
It's so easy to tell yourself "I'm smarter, therefore you must be wrong" and work backwards from there.
now, this’n right here kids is a prime specimen of what those highfalutin desk jockeys call a “global citizen.”
I've been called worse