Don’t miss the message because social media incentivizes us to prioritize rage over action and change.
Beware taking the wrong lessons from painful pandemic stories that get clicks and dopamine hits, but which contain hidden important truths we ignore to our detriment.
Social media Liz, with 11k followers on the app formerly known as twitter, posted what she described as an anonymous DM sent to her, about a conversation someone had with a friend. But then not only amplified all the wrong takeaways, but missed highlighting a really key important detail. This is most likely because social media incentivizes prioritizing anger over action.
The story itself is surely an interesting one, and it’s definitely worth examining. But it’s a shame if we miss something important here. This person has told us exactly what we need to do for infection control, and what won’t or will work with people like her. Take a look for yourself.
Anonymous person: “The conversation was very strange, but also a little cathartic because it helped me feel less insane wondering what people could possibly be thinking. I asked her if she’d be willing to have an open conversation about Covid, and she agreed. Out of all the friends I’ve distanced myself from because of very conflicting stances on Covid, this friend has always been the most reasonable. In our 15 years of friendship, she has shown herself to be clever, wise, thoughtful, and very forward-thinking on matters of equity. Her choices have shocked me more than anyone else’s in the pandemic. It wasn’t out of character for her to agree to speak openly in the conversation, and actively listen to what I had to say. Unfortunately what she had to say was appalling. She downplayed the effects of the virus a little, but mostly her argument was that the culture has decided that we won’t protect each other anymore, so that’s why she doesn’t. It was a strange thing to hear someone say out loud, especially her. I feel like most people are not self-aware enough to admit that. I asked her why we can’t try to change that, and she said the change should come from our leaders. I asked what will happen if a massive amount of the population is disabled in five years, and she said something like “as horrible as it sounds, at least we’ll ALL be dealing with it.” She also asked me about my parenting decisions, and I gave her the “if I’m wrong, I’ve kept my son out of football, if you’re wrong, kids are going to be sick, disabled, and dead speech, which she responded with a “maybe we should all live while we can, then.” I pointed out that I’ve traveled by car to go on a Covid-safe vacation in a rented cabin, that I’ve been to amusement parks and a movie theatre in an N95, though infrequently. She had said at the beginning of the conversation that she doesn’t know anyone with Long Covid, but mentioned at the end that her cousin had had a first-trimester miscarriage when she got Covid. My friend said no one could know for sure if that was what caused it, but she was also the one who brought it up in the context of people who are at greater risk of the disease.”
People sometimes say they’re willing to have an “open conversation” about something, and they may even mean to, but we just can’t take their word for it, and assume everything at face value, because they themselves may not even be aware of the ways they are subject to their own cognitive biases and self-defense mechanisms. We can’t even be sure when we’re being led by our own cognitive biases, because we are all the time.[1]
I don’t intend to defend the moral pretzel being deployed by the person who refuses to take covid risks seriously. But as disturbing as this story might be, I think it’s a mischaracterization of the thought process to boil it all down to a cold rational calculation of misery loves company. Simple stories work well for social media though. I’m sure “everyone’s doing it” and “I won’t be weird then” is certainly part of this person’s attempt to hold their world together with the cheeks of their ass, and defend following the crowd, etc. Peer pressure is a real and powerful phenomenon. But I don’t think they really have thought things through enough to totally explain their decision making process and the rationalizations they’re employing.
The truth is that this person probably really honestly doesn’t believe that they, or their child, are truly going to be the people devastated with disability or death. This person already explained away the friend’s miscarriage, after all. And “it’ll never happen to me” is an incredibly common mindset. I’ve always been the sort of person who can’t understand that mentality because so much already had happened to me — bizarre, unpleasant, odd, and supposedly rare. But the vast majority of people are quite average, by definition, and don’t have that experience.
When she says “in the same boat” she is likely not fully cognizant about what’s going to go on in that boat. There is no further elaboration of her thoughts about what being disabled really means. Many people believe that getting disability benefits is easy. They have probably not considered that disability assistance of any type, let alone healthcare, may be even harder to come by if the demand skyrockets, just with logistics, even setting aside the right-wing agenda against helping anyone at all. Many people have greater faith in medical science than is warranted — they think that medical science can fix just about anything. People often have no idea people with ongoing health problems tend to keep it to themselves. That’s part of why people probably know people with Long Covid — but don’t know it.[2]
We really have no idea if she’s bought into a pseudoscience eugenics faith for that matter. Just because she was willing to say some stuff which some find offensive, doesn’t mean she would feel comfortable coming right out to blatantly say she believes her family has good genes or has been living right and that will advantage them. Eugenics pseudoscience is potent and insidious in its appeal.[3] Seeing “we’ll ALL be dealing with it” as a type of consolation or bright side also strikes me as a form of apocalyptic hopium associated with accellerationism.[4]
So the key point is that all this contemplation over this person’s motives misses the key component to progress. The only thing we really need to know about a person like this is — what will it take to get them to change course? And this person tells us!
mostly her argument was that the culture has decided that we won’t protect each other anymore, so that’s why she doesn’t. It was a strange thing to hear someone say out loud, especially her. I feel like most people are not self-aware enough to admit that. I asked her why we can’t try to change that, and she said the change should come from our leaders.
When asked why not change, she said the change should come from leaders. This is why, despite pluralistic ignorance, when they poll, a large percentage of people support mask requirements[5] despite what the PR-laden media[6] would have you believe. People want rules, in fact often they like them even while complaining about them. Many don’t want to be the ones to make the rules happen, and sometimes they just don’t have the capacity for this type of civic engagement. They want someone else to do it.
And we know how change comes from authorized leaders — it comes because small groups of people who understand a problem, know what needs to be done, pressure people in that leadership to change things. There are numerous examples throughout history that prove this. It doesn’t take everybody, or even a large percentage to get on board. I keep repeating this, including with extensive references, in various formats.[7] I keep trying to tell people we have wonderful role models in Ruth Desmond, “The Peanut Butter Grandma” — champion of food safety rules in the U.S.[8] and Heather Crowe champion of occupational health and safety from second hand smoke in Canada.[9] We have a documented history full of instances where a small number of people pushed for public safety from drunk driving on the roads,[10] for effective public health in government,[11] for civil rights,[12] and clean air,[13] despite these things being seen as low priority, or even unpopular — and then after rules are made protecting the people, including the people who supposedly didn’t care, but later came to support these things.[14]
Unfortunately explaining to others how the progress happens, and how power works to affect change, just isn’t as compelling for the algorithms as anger and misinformation,[15] so it just isn’t something you’ll often see people with 5 digits of followers on social media platforms promoting, because people who do that don’t get the follows. Because “Angry people click.”[16] And so much of the money goes to promoting anger, division, and disgust[17]— even more than sometimes productive outrage.[18] Most of the botnets[19] and troll farms[20] are hitting like and subscribe on the stuff that depresses action and normalizes the harms caused by industry.[21] These operations don’t boost effective political activists that oppose them, they boost the people who are “a gift to enemies” as Alan Kelly describes it, because they “do more to defend and maintain a status quo than shift it” and that rivals welcome these people to the arena because their play “draws attention to the game but does little to steal a victory”[22] — which is typical of the sick burn and the all-theory-no-praxis critique. Influencers have a lot of followers because they’ve figured this out. They’re not concerned with winning any battles, let alone the war, as their priority is to get that sweet attention and boosting, however artificial. Sometimes it’s probably not even conscious since the algorithms are quite good at conditioning humans — most of the social media platforms essentially train people what to post and what not to post to get the likes, subscribers and the corresponding dopamine hits and or money that goes with them.[23] And this media landscape self-licking ice cream cone[24] keeps people trapped shouting into a highly encapsulated silo,[25] spinning wheels and only benefiting the internet industries.
Social media is an activism placebo with a very powerful event horizon.
Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.
”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
Beware: Don’t get caught up in a similar normalization and acquiescence to that which disgusts you.
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” — David Graeber
References:
[1] PBS Hacking Your Mind — Living on Autopilot — Episode 101 Aired: 09/09/20 According to Kahneman, when our slow-thinking system doesn’t have enough information to answer a question involving numbers, we simply stay on autopilot. And our autopilot system takes what might be called a shortcut and anchors its answer to the last number that crossed its radar, even when that number is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. -And that leads us to reach an absurd conclusion. I know it seems bizarre that anyone would do that, and surely you and I, reasonable people, would never do that in our real lives. Well, you do it all the time.
[2] ABC — Long COVID will take your health, your wealth — then it will come for your marriage By Hayley Gleeson — December 27, 2023 And yet, he’s constantly hearing from people who claim to not know anyone with long COVID, or who dismiss it as “someone else’s problem”. “The reality is, you probably know someone with long COVID,” he says. “But the only sign of that is that you’re not seeing them anymore.”
[3] Eugenics as an ideology. Legal and political agendas have motivations to make semantic arguments that obscure eugenics and maybe that’s why we don’t have a separate word for eugenics as an ideological belief. CHLOE HUMBERT NOV 30, 2023 The possibly more prevalent, and somewhat more insidious version of eugenics ideology, that has flown under the radar in our modern world, is the variety that spawned grotesque and wholly unscientific ideas like “natural herd immunity” in the pandemic, as pushed by Scott Atlas5 and The Great Barrington Declaration adherents.6 To withhold prevention of suffering from those vulnerable.The proponents of this type of eugenics claim that they are leaving it up to “nature” or, alternately, specifically a divine power, depending on their religious or secular orientation. The point is to stop any intervention that would save people they think are “weak” or “undeserving” in some way as inappropriately countering the superior “nature” to do its thing.
[4] VOX — Accelerationism: the obscure idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world. How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder. By Zack Beauchamp. Nov 18, 2019 It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms. Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies.
[5] Don’t fall for Pluralistic Ignorance on Masks — Letter campaign to the White House: Provide Free N95 Masks — NIH must stop Long COVID trials on debunked remedies. Pandemic deniers have been so riled up and it’s not good for families or our community. CHLOE HUMBERT JAN 2, 2023 Bar chart of polling data from Data For Progress. Title: Voters Support Masks in Indoor Public Spaces.
[6] Toxic Sludge is Good for You 2002 Currently according to some estimates, more than 50% of what we think is news is actually instigated by the public relations industry. PR professionals measure their success in terms of how well they can insert their clients’ messages into the continuous flow of news and information while their own activities remain out of view.
[7] Don’t wait for everybody before speaking up. Don’t Wait For Everybody — Episode 001 CHLOE HUMBERT AUG 11, 2023 Everything is impossible or unpopular until a few people say, hey, wait a minute, we should do this, and then press for it until others get on board. We can have a better world without convincing the whole world first. Don’t listen to doomsayers who say it can’t happen or won’t or that nobody cares. And don’t waste your time arguing and drawing attention to contrarians and flame wars. It just doesn’t go anywhere. It just takes a few. We don’t need to wait for most people to agree with us. We just need those who do to speak out and push forward.
[8] The Uncertain Hour — Nov 10, 2017 — The Peanut Butter Wars It’s 1959 and Ruth Desmond, the gurney-climbing, cook-from-scratch co-founder of the Federation of Homemakers was prowling the halls of the FDA, about to earn her “peanut butter grandma” namesake. She stumbled upon this unassuming, but ultimately history-changing memo. It was four little paragraphs, a proposal to regulate one of the most popular foods in the country. The government was trying to answer an existential question: how many additives can you put into a jar of peanut butter before it’s not peanut butter anymore? Trying to answer it kicked off a years-long battle that upended the, uh, peanut butter industrial complex. And honestly? Battles like this are how a lot of regulations get made in this country.
[9] Femmes remarquables Ottawa Distinguished Women > Life Time Contribution > Heather Crowe Heather Crowe agreed to appear in Health Canada’s campaign to inform the public about the dangers of second-hand smoke where she demanded stricter laws to protect workers from the awful haze. Her story reached millions of Canadians through television, cinema and transit advertisements, speaking about how she developed cancer from being exposed to second-hand smoke in the restaurant industry. She inspired a powerful media drive to promote the importance of occupational health and safety everywhere in Canada. Many communities, provinces and territories banned smoking in workplaces only after she had visited them and made her personal appeal. Ms. Crowe also championed her ideals on a local level, addressing the Pub and Bar Coalition of Ontario (a group of restaurant owners who did not support the smoke-free by-law after it came into effect). Furthermore, she frequently engaged youth on the effects of tobacco use. Upon receiving her diagnosis and due to being unable to work, Heather Crowe took her case to the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. At first, she was told that lung cancer, despite being due to workplace second-hand smoke exposure, was not recognized as a work-related injury and was therefore not covered. She went looking for support in the Non-Smokers Rights Association and her battle for her rights became very public, all the while pushing through cancer treatments. Ms. Crowe was a person of inexorable strength. She became the first person to win a claim for full compensation for occupational exposure to cigarette smoke and received payments for lost earnings and health care benefits. Her case set a precedent in that the workers’ compensation board was forced to acknowledge that exposure to second-hand smoke was inevitably a work-related injury.
[10] El-Guebaly N. Don’t drink and drive: the successful message of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). World Psychiatry. 2005 Feb;4(1):35–6. PMID: 16633502; PMCID: PMC1414720. Since its inception, MADD has been successful in the enactment of more than 1000 new laws at both the local and national levels, including minimum drinking age, server liability laws and sobriety check points. A particularly effective measure was the production and dissemination of a widely published, annual comparative legislative “Rating of the States/Provinces”. In fact, MADD appears to have exhibited a stronger influence than the Breathalyzer legislation in reducing drinking-driver fatalities.
[11] Institute of Medicine (US) Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health. The Future of Public Health. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1988. 3, A History of the Public Health System. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218224/ From the 1930s through the 1970s, local, state, and federal responsibilities in health continued to increase. The federal role in health also became more prominent. A strong federal government and a strong government role in ensuring social welfare were publicly supported social values of this era. From Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s through Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s, a federal role in services affecting the health and welfare of individual citizens became well established. The federal government and state and local health agencies took on greater roles in providing and planning health services, in health promotion and health education, and in financing health services. The agencies also continued and increased activities in environmental sanitation, epidemiology, and health statistics. Federal programs in disease control, research, and epidemiology expanded throughout the mid-twentieth century. In 1930, the National Hygienic Laboratory relocated to the Washington, D.C., area and was renamed the National Institute of Health (NIH). In 1937, the Institute greatly expanded its research functions to include the study and investigation of all diseases and related conditions and the National Cancer Institute was established as the first of the research institutes focused on particular diseases or health problems. By the 1970s NIH grew to include an Institute for Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, an Institute for Child Health and Human Development, an Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, and an Institute of Mental Health, among others. In 1938, Congress passed a second venereal disease control act, which provided federal funds to states for investigation and control of venereal diseases. In 1939, the Federal Security Agency, housing the Public Health Service and national programs in education and welfare, was established. The Public Health Service also continued to expand. During World War II, the Center for Disease Control was established, and shortly thereafter, the National Center for Health Statistics. (Hanlon and Pickett, 1984) Federal programs supporting individual health services and state programs also continued to grow, both in number of health problems and types of citizens addressed. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935. One title of the act established a federal grant-in-aid program to the states for establishing and maintaining public health services and for training public health personnel.
[12] Ron DeSantis Just Named PragerU an APPROVED VENDOR for Public Schools in Florida!! Jul 30, 2023 I Doubt It Podcast — Jesse Dollemore, Youtube Jesse Dollemore: “This is something we talked about a lot on this show to put in perspective the Republicans have whitewashed the history of the Civil Rights Movement absolutely. they act like everybody was on board the whole time that even during that time there was massive support and the polling does not bear that out it was very unpopular in the the thing that’s super popular and accepted now was very unpopular back then” Brittany Page: “yeah so in May to June of 1961 they did a poll where they asked if people think sit-ins at lunch counters and freedom buses or other demonstrations by Black people were will hurt or help their chances of being integrated into the South and 57 percent said it would hurt. so not supportive.” Jesse Dollemore: “a vast majority almost 60 percent said these things that are that are just lionized now universally understood as good and moving the needle were looked upon as no no no that’s the wrong way to protest. if that rings a bell it should and I hope it does because that’s the narrative we hear now with every race protest related to inequality, inequity, Black Lives Matter, police brutality it’s no no no no no don’t protest like that no oh you want to silently take a knee while the national? no no no no no that’s the wrong way to do it they never say what the right way is but it’s the same thing that was happening in the 60s no that’s the wrong way to protest. Even though those things that were the quote unquote wrong way to protest actually made a difference and got us to where we are right now.” Brittany Page: “Right and the March on Washington happened in August 1963 and Gallup did another poll in June of 1963 so before the March on Washington and they said do you think mass demonstrations by Black people are more likely to help or more likely to hurt the cause for racial equality and in June 1963 60 percent said hurt and then a year later it went up to 74 percent. it increased from 60 to 74 in one year. so people like to think back on this time and say that there was you know widespread support for Martin Luther King Jr and for these demonstrations but no there was not. No there was not.”
[13] Commemorating Earth Day with a Little Legislative History Jonathan Coppess Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics University of Illinois April 22, 2022 farmdoc daily (12):55 Forged in the wake of an oil spill and by the flames of a burning river, history demarks the origins of the modern environmental on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, amid the troubles and turmoil of the Vietnam War at the end of the tumultuous 1960s. Within the first four years of its existence, the movement achieved an unparalleled, impressive legislative and political trifecta. The National Environmental Protection Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972) were all enacted by strong, bipartisan votes across two congresses. In addition, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 with Congressional acquiescence.
[14] Don’t wait for everybody before speaking up. We don’t need to convince everyone before moving forward, and we may already have more on board than it appears anyway. We won’t know until we try. CHLOE HUMBERT AUG 8, 2023 The environmental movement mobilized about 10% of Americans who participated in various local demonstrations around the country for the first Earth Day in 1970. Even in the midst of the turmoil of war protests this movement pressured on environmental issues and so Nixon (yes Nixon) passed “an unparalleled, impressive legislative and political trifecta” later in 1970.3 Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and it was directed to focus on public health effects when developing their regulations — the EPA was specifically instructed to not consider at all the costs to industry in their regulatory decisions.4 In 2018, 48 years later, a nationwide poll showed 74% support the EPA, The Clean Air Act, and stricter limits on air pollution.5
[15] The Washington Post: Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation By Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus Updated October 26, 2021 at 1:04 p.m. EDT|Published October 26, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT “Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,” Haugen told the British Parliament on Monday. In several cases, the documents show Facebook employees on its “integrity” teams raising flags about the human costs of specific elements of the ranking system — warnings that executives sometimes heeded and other times seemingly brushed aside.
[16] Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis. ”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”
[17] The Internet of Fakes — PR Tactics, Troll Farms, Sock Puppets, Botnets, Influencers, Operatives, & Chaos Agents Persuasion, advertising, sales, target marketing, propaganda, agent provocateurs, and cognitive warfare, is the true reality of the media landscape. CHLOE HUMBERT SEP 14, 2023 But whether people are looking to make money in this media space, or merely find they enjoy attention, it’s not too hard to figure out what buzzwords or topics are going to garner the most likes and views, often assisted by someone else’s operation’s troll farms and botnets. And sadly, the biggest money seems to be behind boosting the absolute worst products, ideas, and politics, and boosting controversy about bad things, thereby getting those bad things more attention than they would have otherwise. And often this drive includes undermining things that are prosocial and scientifically sound, because public health and science often run counter to the interests of those running these operations.
[18] Outrage factor From Wikipedia “Outrage factors” are the emotional factors that influence perception of risk. The risks that are considered involuntary, industrial and unfair are often given more weight than factors that are thought of as voluntary, natural and fair. Sandman gives the formula: Risk = Hazard + Outrage
[19] DarkReading.com — The Rise Of Social Media Botnets. In the social Internet, building a legion of interconnected bots — all accessible from a single computer — is quicker and easier than ever before. By James C. Foster, Founder & CEO, ZeroFOX, July 07, 2015 Cyber criminals use social media botnets to disseminate malicious links, collect intelligence on high profile targets, and spread influence. As opposed to traditional botnets, each social bot represents an automated social account rather than an infected computer. This means building a legion of interconnected bots is much quicker and easier than ever before, all accessible from a single computer. The person commanding the botnet, also known as a bot herder, generally has two options for building their botnet. The first is fairly ad hoc, simply registering as many accounts as possible to a program that allows the herder to post via the accounts as if they were logged in. The second approach is to create the botnet via a registered network application: the attacker makes a phony app, links a legion of accounts, and changes the setting to allow the app to post on behalf of the associated accounts. Via the app, the herder then has programmatic access to the full army of profiles. This is essentially how ISIS built their Dawn of Glad Tidings application, which acts as a centralized hub that posts en masse on behalf of all its users.
[20] BBC Trending (podcast) — Brazil’s real life trolls — Sun 23 Apr 2023 “Trolls are necessary and I’m going to explain why. We have a troll farm. A lot of them. What we don’t use are bots. Bots are different things. you can buy it in India and they give you 10,000 likes in a second. That doesn’t work because it’s not legitimate. What we do, for example with trolls, is to generate some kind of relevance within the social network’s algorithms. They have become very rigid about what they show and what they don’t. And that has to do with the relevance of the publication. So what trolls do is give relevance to a certain publication. Good publicity, so that it can be shown more than other publications.”
[21] Rand Waltzman’s Post on Linkedin Strategies for manufacturing doubt (6) Image has a cartoon where someone is staring at a door that is labeled journalism 101 and from inside the door comes the speech bubble that says fake news is announced, real news is leaked, and another cartoon labeled the reality of journalism, and it’s a drawing of a hand with an ink pen in it, and another hand is inserting a coin into the pen. The text reads Appeal to mass media. Appeal to journalistic balance. Develop relationships with media personnel. Prepare information for media personnel. Invoke the fairness doctrine. Take advantage of target’s lack of money / influence. Silence or abuse individuals by, out-spending, exploiting a power imbalance. Normalize negative outcomes. Normalize the presence of negative effects. Reduce importance. Make them seem inevitable.
[22] Small Wars Journal — Wed, 01/19/2022–8:29pm WHY RESPONDING IS LOSING: The Plays We Run (and the Plays We Don’t) to Defeat Disinformation. By Alan Kelly Figure 3 Shown in color against the Taxonomy of Influence Strategies are nine of 23 plays that are typically employed to meet and mitigate competitive influence programs and operations. Despite their popularity, this subset is notably defensive and often helpful to rival actors. Shown in gray are nine other plays that are often ignored by responding players but more capable of creating and maintaining strategic advantage in narrative conflicts. When competitors ding your reputation or dis your brand it’s a reasonable impulse to fight back, especially when the messages they’re making are mistaken or deceptive. But be careful. The plays that often inspire response are usually better at scoring points than winning games. Here’s why: DEFENSIVE PLAYS Whether it’s conservative policies, inexperience at narrative knife fights, or a bias for taking the proverbial high road, responders typically run plays that frame, divert and press (shown in color). These are influence strategies that do more to defend and maintain a status quo than shift it. Accordingly, responders avoid plays that probe, freeze or provoke (shown in gray). These are better for beating rivals, not simply beating them back. A GIFT TO ENEMIES If this is you, beware. Rivals will welcome you to their arena. And why not? A competitor with weak plays draws attention to the game but does little to steal a victory.
[23] MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy — Thinker-Fest: Session 1 — Fireside Chat — How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 There are also indirect economic benefits. These are people that create content farms so for example there are businesses who are just invested in getting people to click regardless of what side. We see this a lot in the political sphere where you’ll have the same company creating extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing content with a goal to monetize the clicks and the revenues. And then you also see hidden benefits and this is where it gets a little tricky these are companies that benefit from the discourse in ways that are slightly removed. So for example the latest conspiracy theory of 2023 which is the “15-minute City” conspiracy which we can talk about that is, that gives a lot of benefit to oil. And that is being perpetuated by Big Oil influencers which I’m sad to say actually exist. And so that is something to look at, that all of these end consumers are being accessed, or being manipulated, by very specific economic agendas.
[24] Self-licking ice cream cone — Wikipedia In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman,[1] and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA’s bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.[2][3]
[25] Center for Humane Technology — How Social Media Features Parallel Cult Techniques — Published on June 2, 2022 Parallels: Authoritarian Cult Techniques & Social Media Features. LOVE BOMBING. Cults shower new members with affirmation, affection, and flattery for joining, creating a sense of instant community with shared values. Social media platforms shower users with positive notifications after joining, while personalized feeds create the perception of a community “just like you” EXPLOITING CONFIRMATION BIAS. Cults adopt techniques like self-reinforcing circular logic to disorient, overload, and confuse members in order to program new beliefs which confirm their existing biases. Platforms have personalized feeds, which result in information silos that confirm what users already believe.
