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My teen years were the second half of the 80s. Like a lot of kids my age, I’d sometimes seek out weird stuff outside of the pre-internet mainstream. One of my f

My teen years were the second half of the 80s. Like a lot of kids my age, I’d sometimes seek out weird stuff outside of the pre-internet mainstream. One of my favorite books from back then was “High Weirdness by Mail”. Which was a very funny tongue-in-cheek catalog of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, cults, etc. I won’t detail all the weird stuff I got in the mail, but it suffices to say that most of it was roughly on the same level as Q. But the key difference between now and then was: I had to seek this crap. Someone had to put together their zine or cassette or, very rarely, their full color glossy magazine. All at their own expense and then send it off to me. Ordinary people would never see this stuff. The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff. And this material was too labor intensive & expensive to distribute widely without the mainstream. So it’s obviously very different now. People like my mom would have never sent a dollar to a post office box in Idaho to get a newsletter about how Ronald Reagan was a microchip controlled antichrist. But these days I frequently have to alleviate her fear from some conspiracy crap that popped up on her timeline unsolicited. Or to tell my aunt that there’s absolutely no evidence Biden is receiving antifa messages from a hidden earpiece. I don’t know what the answer is. But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new. Having something like Q approach mainstream status is new. At least for Americans in the past 50 years. It’s a potentially very dangerous situation. Maybe one day, a vast majority of the population will discount what they read online without corroborating evidence, but we’re not there yet.

free_rms 6y ago
So, what, we're gonna decide what's "suitable" for normal people to see? Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all". But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  The Russians engaged in a campaign to disrupt the US elections. That is not in dispute. They were effective in this by hacking the DNC and Podesta and by using thousands of troll accounts to pretend there was anything scandalous in that data. Cambridge Analytica had negligible role in affecting the election. That was just a privacy scandal for Facebook.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    You've identified the only claims that hold up. Compare to the crazy rhetoric and insinuation we saw for years, and it's clear people were way ahead of themselves.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      Some people insinuated that Trump worked with the Russians to get their help, but the consistent message that came from his cast off associates and from journalists with access like Woodward was that he was too stupid to set anything like that up. I don't think anybody reasonable ever believed otherwise. The Russians didn't give a damn what Trump wanted. He was simply a useful buffoon that they could use to disrupt the election, and they succeeded beyond their wildest hopes.
ajxs 6y ago
> The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff... This is a side-effect of the legacy media organisations no longer having a monopoly on the dissemination of information. Think for a moment on what kind of disinformation you may have unwittingly taken at face value for fact simply because every single news media outlet reported it. This is exactly the concern that my original post highlighted. My fear is that if we allow them to become the arbiters of online information, it goes far beyond simply censoring the ridiculous and becomes a highly effective means of pursuing their own political agendas. > But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new... It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena. Whether the phenomenon being new or not is beside the point. The concern is that conspiracy theories are spreading more than they were in the past, and that groups have learned to exploit the them to accomplish their goals. This has a parallel to what happened with computer malware. It's existed for about as long as home computers have, but up until 2000 or so, the bulk of it was merely childish pranks and wasn't very concerning. Since then, it's exploded in volume and danger, as criminals realized it could be used to make money by sending spam, stealing passwords and payment info, or by holding data ransom. I remember getting a virus on a floppy disk when I was a kid, but that doesn't make me comfortable with getting contemporary malware on my computer.

free_rms 6y ago

So, what, we're gonna decide what's "suitable" for normal people to see? Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all". But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.

lern_too_spel 6y ago
The Russians engaged in a campaign to disrupt the US elections. That is not in dispute. They were effective in this by hacking the DNC and Podesta and by using thousands of troll accounts to pretend there was anything scandalous in that data. Cambridge Analytica had negligible role in affecting the election. That was just a privacy scandal for Facebook.
- free_rms 6y ago
  You've identified the only claims that hold up. Compare to the crazy rhetoric and insinuation we saw for years, and it's clear people were way ahead of themselves.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    Some people insinuated that Trump worked with the Russians to get their help, but the consistent message that came from his cast off associates and from journalists with access like Woodward was that he was too stupid to set anything like that up. I don't think anybody reasonable ever believed otherwise. The Russians didn't give a damn what Trump wanted. He was simply a useful buffoon that they could use to disrupt the election, and they succeeded beyond their wildest hopes.

ajxs 6y ago

> The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff... This is a side-effect of the legacy media organisations no longer having a monopoly on the dissemination of information. Think for a moment on what kind of disinformation you may have unwittingly taken at face value for fact simply because every single news media outlet reported it. This is exactly the concern that my original post highlighted. My fear is that if we allow them to become the arbiters of online information, it goes far beyond simply censoring the ridiculous and becomes a highly effective means of pursuing their own political agendas. > But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new... It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena.

ardy42 6y ago
> It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena. Whether the phenomenon being new or not is beside the point. The concern is that conspiracy theories are spreading more than they were in the past, and that groups have learned to exploit the them to accomplish their goals. This has a parallel to what happened with computer malware. It's existed for about as long as home computers have, but up until 2000 or so, the bulk of it was merely childish pranks and wasn't very concerning. Since then, it's exploded in volume and danger, as criminals realized it could be used to make money by sending spam, stealing passwords and payment info, or by holding data ransom. I remember getting a virus on a floppy disk when I was a kid, but that doesn't make me comfortable with getting contemporary malware on my computer.