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Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

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Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#21

Post by nitwit005 »

l33tbro wrote: post #7

All 5g gay frogs aside, this a power problem and not really a people problem. How many establishment institutions are left that citizens would wish to enthusiastically uphold? We have come to almost expect corruption and these days. This isn't a justification for irrational conspiracy theory (which are generally harmless, yet occasionally highly catastrophic). It's that the establishment whack-em-all approach is not…

The conspiracy fans seem rather disinterested in conspiracies that are obviously happening, like people bribing government officials.

They seem to prefer implausible conspiracies, or where there is some ambiguity, such as documents that aren't public.

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#22

Post by potato3732842 »

mastazi wrote: post #17

IMHO - distrust in the establishment is not the cause, but a side effect of the real cause. I used to be a journalist before my career in tech. In my opinion, the real culprit is that news outlets now have the wrong incentives. When people still used to buy printed newspapers, you had to pay for your news so you better get well researched articles for your hard earned money. [1] With the rise of internet news, that i…

> is that news outlets now have the wrong incentives.

You know how one sausage is made. But every factory is filthy just like yours.

I work with "the establishment". It has the wrong incentives too, just different ones.

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#23

Post by Insanity »

It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You watch one conspiracy video, the algorithm learns and recommends more of it.

Humans absorb what we see around us and our identity is now also formed by what we consume. So essentially you get a type of flywheel where you become more and more sucked in by virtue of watching more.

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#24

Post by JumpCrisscross »

l33tbro wrote: post #16
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this a power problem and not really a people problem It’s an education and channel incentive problem. Our kids’ literacy is crashing [1]. And most Americans get their news through channels that are incentivised by selling ads. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/us-students-reading-math-s...

I totally agree about literacy being huge, and would actually extend it to going beyond literacy. The literacy crash is alarming, and is no doubt agitating this situation in a major way. However, I think what we are experiencing is something like a kind of siloing of private realities. Not the pearl-clutching 'echo chamber' discourse from 2019. But an increasing lack of social competency amongst younger people that i…

> their answer does seem to be more censorship and surveillance, rather than addressing the causes of these problems

The power hypothesis doesn’t explain Flat Eartherism. That’s just stupid people believing what I cannot imagine started as anything but a tantrum.

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#25

Post by brikym »

l33tbro wrote: post #7

All 5g gay frogs aside, this a power problem and not really a people problem. How many establishment institutions are left that citizens would wish to enthusiastically uphold? We have come to almost expect corruption and these days. This isn't a justification for irrational conspiracy theory (which are generally harmless, yet occasionally highly catastrophic). It's that the establishment whack-em-all approach is not…

The wackiest conspiracy theories are probably the ones most promoted by the establishment since they taint all the plausible theories.

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#26

Post by ViscountPenguin »

mastazi wrote: post #17

IMHO - distrust in the establishment is not the cause, but a side effect of the real cause. I used to be a journalist before my career in tech. In my opinion, the real culprit is that news outlets now have the wrong incentives. When people still used to buy printed newspapers, you had to pay for your news so you better get well researched articles for your hard earned money. [1] With the rise of internet news, that i…

Seems like it'd run a bit further than the invention of the internet then, right? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is scathing of the move to ad supported newspapers way back in the past, leading to the rise of companies like News Corp.

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#27

Post by maxbond »

cjpartridge wrote: post #6

Because everything anti-establishment is a conspiracy, remember folks, trust the main stream media - they definitely aren't working hand in hand with intelligence agencies and corporations.

The YouTuber Milo Rossi [1], who debunks archaeological conspiracy theories (and makes educational content about archaeology) likes to say (paraphrasing slightly) "you don't need to make up conspiracy theories to be mad at the government, you can be mad at the actual government for what they actually do." Institutions/"the establishment" deserve skepticism but that skepticism has to be grounded in the real world and in evidence you can actually acquire. Not in supposition about a nebulous "they" pulling the strings. Conspiracy theories rapidly devolve into something entirely unfalsifiable.

A key smell test is: Does receiving pushback or counter evidence strengthen your conviction that you are correct? If so, you're going down a dangerous path. You're painting yourself into a corner where you will have a lot of trouble changing your mind, even if you're wrong.

The "main stream media" is the worst source, except for most of the other ones. It's not valuable because it is gospel - it's plain to see that the media is fallible. It's valuable because it adheres to any standard of evidence whatsoever while producing content at scale. It's like what people sometimes say about Wikipedia, it's the best place to begin your research but it doesn't have to end there.

[1] https://youtube.com/@miniminuteman773

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#28

Post by JumpCrisscross »

markus_zhang wrote: post #14

People don’t trust the establishment because it doesn’t take care of them. Trump is simply a symptom, whether you agree with him or not. If Democracy is simply Oligarchy with voting as a decoration and sometime even that was gamed, then to the hell with this democracy.

This is the Hillbilly Elegy hypothesis. I used to buy it. I’m now less convinced. There is a hateful streak in America driven, in part, by reduced attention spans, literacy and ad-powered algorithms. When those folks get better off, they don’t become less hateful. (I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.)

> If Democracy is simply Oligarchy with voting as a decoration and sometime even that was gamed, then to the hell with this democracy

Do you really think you’ll be treated better in a quasi-monarchy?

Re: Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube

#29

Post by luxuryballs »

I think there’s been this sudden realization that the media can’t be trusted (for good reason) but people have been so long trusting the news that now they can’t accept the true reality which is NOT KNOWING THINGS and so they go to the internet to fulfill the addiction to a false feeling of knowing what’s going on and think “this must be true instead” but really we all need to accept that we just can’t know things to the extent that the media claimed they had the answers for, and that’s a healthy and good thing to embrace.
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