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When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution. When someone tells me th
by crmrc114 7y ago
When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution.
When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun.
That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedback loop. You can happily mute them still.
- manish_gill 7y agoThe problem is when people with such beliefs acquire position of power or influence, which sadly has already happened.
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoWhat happens when your child, sibling, friend, parent, or lover is saying those things that they got from the internet?
- Jaygles 7y agoI don't think ignoring the nutters is viable. Enough people are believing anti-vax lies to start bringing back deadly disease which affect more than just themselves. Enough people are believing climate change propaganda which is slowly harming the habitability of our planet for our human race. What was once contained on the internet is leaking out onto the streets and is already affecting you and I in many ways.
- pnw_hazor 7y agoPropaganda has always been there. During the Golden Age of broadcast TV and Radio (pre-internet), the big networks broadcasted plenty of unchallenged lies. The difference now is that laymen can fact check the content put out by the big players. But the price for this is that every troll or nutter has access to the some of the same tools to spread their own lunacy. I far prefer the current situation over the previous. While it may have felt more comfortable when people believed that news readers were telling the truth or reporting truth, it never was that way.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoTrolls (either human or bots) are way more dangerous that TV propaganda because the act as legitimate actors in the public discourse. It gives them the ability to hide between other people and manipulate the conversation.
- claytongulick 7y agoIt's interesting that you mention climate change in this, I agree that it's ground zero for demonstrating the phenomenon of expressing things as objective truth, or fact, that are much more complex than a simple binary.
- slg 7y ago>When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer... I ignore them. What happens when you see that same person talking to a cancer patient trying to sell them plant oil?
- jandrese 7y agoWhen you ignore them you tacitly endorse their position. Their propaganda is being broadcast uncontested, there will be people who believe it. Those people will spread it to other people. Pretty soon whooping cough is back and people are dying. The truth can't advocate for itself.
- anigbrowl 7y ago'The world as we know it is ending and people like crmrc114 are to blame. There s/he goes right now, messing up the world as we know it!. You know what to do people.' Added as we know it because it's actually quite easy to persuade people that what they like about the world is under dire threat, as opposed to the objective existence of the planet or life thereon. People's individual worlds tend to be quite small and it's easy and socially/politically profitable to market to them with threats rather than inducements to expansion with all the unpredictability that entails. Now, imagine that you've been identified to or by an angry group as the cause of their dissatisfaction. This is a very different dynamic from 'someone on a street corner' that you can usually safely ignore, and against whom you probably feel you could defend yourself if necessary. I don't think you'd be so dismissive of nutters in groups if you were negatively impacted.