It'd be interesting to see if it's possible to gather the data you'd need to be able to automatically trace the spread of memes like this. If you can identify t

It'd be interesting to see if it's possible to gather the data you'd need to be able to automatically trace the spread of memes like this. If you can identify the provenance, and the network of groups and people used to propagate these ideas, it could be possible to effectively counter them at scale. The trouble I see is that ad tech is politically, morally, and ethically agnostic, and so awesomely powerful tools for mass distribution of memes are made available to anyone that can pay. There's an arms race between transparency and placement, between freedom of speech and mass manipulation. Qanon made expert use of social media and ad tech, and successfully scrambled the brains of tens of millions of people who shouldn't have been made vulnerable. Similar spheres of influence and control exist around all of the major social and legacy media institutions, from Facebook to CNN to Sinclair media. These abstract clusters of humanity are subjected to information siloing and controlled exposure to memes. In most cases, there's an institutional algorithm at play, without a person or cabal explicitly in charge, so the marketing and advertising professionals responsible for the skillful deployment of any given idea never feel any sense of culpability for the side effects. Reddit and its use by the dnc , or Facebook by the rnc shows the effects of political power augmented by optimized attention capture. "Carbon footprint" and personal recycling are seemingly simple concepts, but they're almost fractal in their interactions with our psychology . Information about the facts of what's happening in the world is blasted out, available for anyone in the world, but through the use of platforms and attention capture, we're subtly nudged into interpretations and narratives intended to deflect accountability. The idea of media bubbles seems to be another example of corporate diversion, implying people are responsible for how they're being manipulated. Maybe FAANG shouldn't be enabling the manipulation and escalating the use of attention capture tools. The fundamental issue seems to be private data harvesting and allowing targeted advertisement. That's the information that allows manipulation to be scaled, and abused at scale. The only solutions I see are either escalating an arms race between automated personal curation and institutional ad tech, or correctly limiting the use and collection of private data through legislation. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to be able to escape their bubbles through better tools and behaviors, so we need laws that are going to radically disrupt the status quo of big tech.