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Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.
> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.
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> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.
The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus. There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualit…
Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.
The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.
That's what did it for me, zero Reddit unless I can't find the information anywhere else, and even then it's for viewing a single post and then I'm gone.
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If your complaint is that the right-wing lies of the laptop story weren’t amplified, then you desire propaganda to be spread. We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.
I thought the entire story was suppressed at the request of a government agency, not just specific opinions about it.
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For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective
tik tok recently added Footnotes
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Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encoun…
Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"? > Alternative views definitely have reach. Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the fact you saw s…
Strongly argue that TODAY has far more diversity of thought being communicated on various media than 2024. Disagree on being "in 1984 situation," the whole "Biden is sharp as a tack" -> replaced without primary "Campaign of Joy" is as 1984 is you can get. Very clear evidence of syndication occurring across various news outlets, and those syndicated stories don't happen for free. The hard evidence you request is thoroughly concealed and hard to follow as it gets washed through non profits and NGOs. USASpending shows $2mm direct in 2024 to NYT as an example, but it's no stretch to assert indirect sources as well.
X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial services .
Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.
It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies. We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion…
It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v... Tha…