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I've kind of watched the meme resistance thing in real time. We had this massive authoritarian populist right wing movement a few years ago that really exploit

by api 5y ago

I've kind of watched the meme resistance thing in real time. We had this massive authoritarian populist right wing movement a few years ago that really exploited the fact that a huge number of Internet-naive people had just been brought online via the mobile/tablet revolution. These people had never been exposed to memes (in the Internet parlance), troll culture, conspiracy theories, propaganda bots, click bait, and all the other tools of the Internet influence trade and were easy pickings for a loosely organized confederation of "alt-right" propagandists. As this happened I watched a surge in analytical takes on this from both the left and from anti-authoritarian libertarian (a.k.a. actual libertarian) circles. I saw podcasts that had formerly discussed conspiracy and fringe ideas in a detached "Art Bell" style pivot and go "meta" on these theories and start digging into their intellectual and cultural origins. I saw books like "It Came From Something Awful" that analyzed these phenomena become bestsellers in more mainstream circles. All that analysis was the immune system working. The Pepe the frog movement was a one off thing. It won't be repeated. I doubt we will see anything as explosively successful as Qanon again either. Sure there will be things like that on the fringes but something that vaults from a dumb 4chan LARP into a nationwide movement within a month or two is not likely to happen a second time. The population has already been exposed. China on the other hand... if this is what they are doing and if they are actually successful at it, they will remain deeply vulnerable to an outbreak of this type of propaganda whether it originates from foreign or domestic sources (or most likely a mix thereof). P.S. I think the strongest argument against deplatforming is that this is interfering with the process of memetic immunity. Given that we have no vaccines against toxic memes (or even a theory of how that would work), letting the population get exposed and achieving herd immunity is probably the best strategy. So go ahead, let tons of naive "conspiracy virgins" get sucked into Qanon or whatever. They need to build up their immune systems. I rolled my eyes instantly at Q because I knew chan culture and I also recognized a grab bag of worn old conspiracy tropes from Usenet in the 1990s. I saw all that stuff when I was fifteen. I've changed my mind on deplatforming multiple times, but I think this is where I've settled as I've watched everything play out. Democracy, if we let it function, is antifragile.

dangerlibrary 5y ago
We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually the result of a successful de-platforming effort.
- api 5y ago
  No, but given that the spread of these things through social networks resembles infectious disease we can take an educated guess. I'd propose that deplatforming probably stretched out the curve. I suppose an argument could still be made from that. Maybe without stretching out the curve we would have seen significant loss of life on January 6th from many more thousands of Q people marching on the capital and eventually being hurt or killed in confrontations with capital police and the national guard. That would not have been good, though it would have in the long term perhaps more deeply discredited the movement. We can never live the counterfactual with history.
  - gogithefish 5y ago
    Possibly. Also important to note that by responding improperly to such threats, the institutions themselves end up weakening themselves. For example, instead of being honest about what vaccines can and can't do, they pre-empt the dumbest arguments by pretending vaccines are perfect. Once some (reasonable) limits to efficacy become known, the institutions are completely discredited and the anti-vaxxer meme becomes even more powerful.
kevinmchugh 5y ago
I'm having trouble squaring the idea that American adults were unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and the way the JFK assassination is talked about. Or Loose Change is more obvious to me as the first Internet-native conspiracy theory to go mainstream.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  No, conspiracy theories have always been floating around, and people have always been pushing them. The difference is that the rest of society fought tooth-and-nail to keep them underground. Nowadays most social media platforms work tirelessly to keep you on a steady drip of whatever content happens to push your buttons the best. So if the system thinks you might buy into a conspiracy theory, it'll keep serving you more and more extreme versions of that meme. This is a necessary side effect of how a recommendation engine works. One particularly odd bit of misinformation about how misinformation spreads is the idea that otherwise normal people are merely tricked into believing it. In other words, someone says "the moon landing was faked" or "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" and everyone believes it because monkey reptile brain. This is a very simplified idea of how conspiracy shit spreads. Most people tend to be highly critical of new information and view it in context based on how plausible it seems. Even theories like Jeffrey Epstein being murdered in prison are only believable because it fits in with the already-proven facts, not because we just want the story to be more interesting.[0] Conspiracy theorists think differently. To put it bluntly, they are extremely gullible. They want to believe information that fits a simplified narrative. And so they tend to disconnect from everyone else and connect to other conspiracy theorists[1]. This has been happening years, decades, arguably centuries prior to today's social media world. It just wasn't nearly as visible. Now, the gullible people group together on social media and plan out how to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Decades ago, you could never imagine organizing the world's moon landing conspiracy theorists to flash-mob Cape Canaveral; because we didn't let these people have a platform. But now we do. [0] If you're wondering, I actually don't think Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison. [1] RationalWiki calls this process "crank magnetism"

by api 5y ago

dangerlibrary 5y ago

We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually the result of a successful de-platforming effort.

api 5y ago
No, but given that the spread of these things through social networks resembles infectious disease we can take an educated guess. I'd propose that deplatforming probably stretched out the curve. I suppose an argument could still be made from that. Maybe without stretching out the curve we would have seen significant loss of life on January 6th from many more thousands of Q people marching on the capital and eventually being hurt or killed in confrontations with capital police and the national guard. That would not have been good, though it would have in the long term perhaps more deeply discredited the movement. We can never live the counterfactual with history.
- gogithefish 5y ago
  Possibly. Also important to note that by responding improperly to such threats, the institutions themselves end up weakening themselves. For example, instead of being honest about what vaccines can and can't do, they pre-empt the dumbest arguments by pretending vaccines are perfect. Once some (reasonable) limits to efficacy become known, the institutions are completely discredited and the anti-vaxxer meme becomes even more powerful.

kevinmchugh 5y ago

I'm having trouble squaring the idea that American adults were unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and the way the JFK assassination is talked about. Or Loose Change is more obvious to me as the first Internet-native conspiracy theory to go mainstream.

kmeisthax 5y ago
No, conspiracy theories have always been floating around, and people have always been pushing them. The difference is that the rest of society fought tooth-and-nail to keep them underground. Nowadays most social media platforms work tirelessly to keep you on a steady drip of whatever content happens to push your buttons the best. So if the system thinks you might buy into a conspiracy theory, it'll keep serving you more and more extreme versions of that meme. This is a necessary side effect of how a recommendation engine works. One particularly odd bit of misinformation about how misinformation spreads is the idea that otherwise normal people are merely tricked into believing it. In other words, someone says "the moon landing was faked" or "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" and everyone believes it because monkey reptile brain. This is a very simplified idea of how conspiracy shit spreads. Most people tend to be highly critical of new information and view it in context based on how plausible it seems. Even theories like Jeffrey Epstein being murdered in prison are only believable because it fits in with the already-proven facts, not because we just want the story to be more interesting.[0] Conspiracy theorists think differently. To put it bluntly, they are extremely gullible. They want to believe information that fits a simplified narrative. And so they tend to disconnect from everyone else and connect to other conspiracy theorists[1]. This has been happening years, decades, arguably centuries prior to today's social media world. It just wasn't nearly as visible. Now, the gullible people group together on social media and plan out how to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Decades ago, you could never imagine organizing the world's moon landing conspiracy theorists to flash-mob Cape Canaveral; because we didn't let these people have a platform. But now we do. [0] If you're wondering, I actually don't think Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison. [1] RationalWiki calls this process "crank magnetism"