Boomers are intimidated by tech (which, fine...) and FULL of unearned pride and an always churning fear of being exposed as frauds who don't deserve allv they have.
The combination means they need to performatively "do tech" to prove to the kids (and to themselves, because of course they are also raging narcissists) that they "have the memes" too and can "do a post".
So they will do this misinfo spreading, likely often unknowingly, bit not for the obvious reason.
Oh sweet, a news bandwagon to hop on to hide my rabid male chauvinism and misogyny behind. I love any excuse to air my deeply troubling views on women in public without repercussions!
Yeah but you probably always knew your uncle as having those qualities.
What's most amazing is watching your high school best friends, who you haven't seen since Thanksgiving weekend your freshman year of college, slowly become racist conservative bigots.
I was actually shocked when I found the quiet lady in accounting was actually a huge Twitter user who spewed such wild shit, at the level of JK Rowling toxicity.
i worked on a pc used by an older, very "conservative" woman awhile back. needed help with her facebook accounts (plural), among other things. she had vpn clients, multiple browsers. tor, the whole bit on there.
it would be one thing if she was just passing tracts, but she was all-in on the fake news, trump, anti-vax, the border, jan 6 and 'the steal'.. basically the whole far-right agenda. and she was spreading that manure far and wide.
the kicker: she's an employee of a local catholic parish.
This is actually the most shocking thing of all. We raise little misinformation spreaders all over the world, base their entire worldview on dogmatic believes and act surprised when they grow up and spread misinformation.
Social media, not just Twitter. The key issue here is human nature. These platforms are just the force multiplier. Misinformation is alive and well on Lemmy as well. It just flies under the radar for the most part because it doesn't go against your prior beliefs.
I don't think there's a silver bullet for it. What works is critical thinking and humility about what you don't know. One good rule of thumb is to keep in mind that things are virtually always nuanced and complicated. When ever someone presents something as simple, straight forward, black and white etc. an alarm should go off. Even when what is being said might not technically be incorrent it's still often just one side of the story. There's always the other side to it as well. Nothing/no one is all bad or all good. If one stands for a cause but can't make a single good faith argument against their own view about it then they're not thinking honestly about it.
Sure, but I'd love a software way to reduce it even if there's no silver bullet. All the critical thinking in the world won't make me immune to propaganda, and realistically the average person isn't going to change any time soon.
If there's always another side, then there's another side to your "there's always another side" argument, so perhaps there are some one-sided topics like "does something exist".
Yeah that's another rule-of-thumb: Never say never or always, there's always an exception. I'm also fully aware of the irony of that whole sentence.
Yeah I get what you mean. Would be nice to have but I don't know how such an add-on would work in practice. I imagine that rather than filtering it out it would instead need to be something that adds a correction/context next to it. There's usually atleast a kernel of truth even in misinformation so simply just hiding it doesn't seem optimal either. An interesting point about free-speech I heard recently was that by silencing the fringes it leaves the rest of us ignorant to what views people hold as well as prevents us from hearing all the evidence that they're wrong. Generally I'm not against misinformation on places like Lemmy but what I do wish is that the top comment on each thread was the one providing nuance, context and correction. This place just doesn't encourage that. There's a set of accepted beliefs and viewpoints and anything going against that is just met with hostility. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful psychological phenomenom and people don't like their beliefs challenged.
For a relatively tame one, just yesterday there was this idea making the rounds that Cohen saw jail time for the "exact same crime" that Trump did, so we could expect jail time for Trump. This despite the fact that they actually did totally different crimes.
In my experience so far, lemmings are the dumbest and most naive userbase of any social media I've ever been on. But then I left Facebook back in like '07 so I didn't see the worst of it
But where? I haven't seen anything of this sort personally and definitely not that specific one. I do think Lemmy is very hive-mindey in my xp, especially towards hating AI and crypto etc. usually fairly mindlessly as well so I was disappointed, plus shitjustworks has the dumbest people overall
Oh yeah don't trust randos in comments obviously, that is always misinfo or opinions on any platform. I thought you meant like highly upvoted article posts everywhere.
Whenever l have run into snooty Quebequois that insist that I speak French, I channel Peggy and say "Jay parlay fran-says tray bee-en. Jay-tude on lay-cole quart ons."
That does the trick and they will beg me to speak English.
i had this cuban moreno friend who was overly proud of his spanish heritage and would make fun of my chicano spanish sometimes. each time he did it in public, i would shut him up by asking someone in the group which one of us was latino which one was american; my garden variety mexican looks always got picked as latino and his afrocubano ass got picked as american. it was especially delicious if the person i asked knew that he could speak spanish.
i thoroughly enjoyed using american racism to put him in his place and it's probably the only time in my life where that racism worked to my advantage. lol
Karens are different imo. Peggy would never call the cops on a black person, or present some distorted/dishonest version of events to a store manager/911. Shes just a narcissist. I could see an B plot of her getting pulled into a Karen's orbit though.
Kahn I could definitely see doing some straight up Karen shit.