U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

These sorts of things did happen before the internet though. Think of the Cultural Revolution in China started by revolutionary university students.

Mass printed pamphlets was the original meme. The more things change the more they stay the same.

The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will.

To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions.

Just to make myself clear, when I say politicians I mean someone who tries to bring politican change, not someone who works in the government making decisions.

Democracy sounds nice, but it assumes people want to participate in it: actively validate facts, find truthful information not just vote whoever promises more of what you like.

Of course on the other hand you have the european federation: they are able to make unpopular choices, but at a steep cost which ends up hurting the member states and making the general population pretty hateful of the european central government.

Governments are too big to change, but what we have doesn't work and we're probably going to be in a world of hurt as the american type democracy(japan, australia, etc) is being manipulated from all sides, federations are uncompetitive and dictatorships becoming the strongest government there is being able to accelerate faster than anyone else and becoming the defacto world power.

> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.

Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest".

I do have to say though, I certainly am enjoying watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the prior monopoly holders on propaganda though, lashing out desperately in the face of their waning influence. They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).

I feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.

For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.

Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.