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This is BS. People saying Kamala was too liberal, or too centrist, she was riding too much on Biden achievements or not enough etc etc.
The real reason for this is that majority of people no longer get their news from MSM, they get their news from social media which are hevily slanted for trump. Not only GOP understands how influential those are, but they are helped with foreign entities who are free to use these media as well.
This also isn't just happening to US but also to Europe.
The fucking solution is to get your family off of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc. it is a cancer and essentially hacks their brain.
You might think that social media is great, because everyone can have a voice. This might be true for sites like Lemmy, but in other places what you post is irrelevant, because their algorithm controls what others see. It is very clever, because they can hide behind freedom of speech to not restrict the sites, while essentially still having full control of what it is shown and zero consequences.
With AI they don't even need people anymore they can generate content themselves and say it is a real user.
Why do you think companies involved in social media are also heavily invested with generative AI?
What you're implying here is that people aren't smart enough to navigate social media intelligently, without being duped by propaganda and group think, yet you are.
Protecting dumb people by hiding them from social media, is a bad fix for a symptom of other major problems. Fixing symptoms like this is never a good solution.
What we need is education massively overhauled, to the point it would be unrecognizable to what we have today. People should have the critical thinking skills and educational background to laugh there ass off and shrug off ~~right wing~~ propaganda, and never let it take hold.
This is a much bigger problem, and we're losing significantly, but it's what should be discussed instead of just hiding social media from people.
The social media sites are known to collect vast information about us. The explanation is that it is meant for targeted ads, but the same information can be also used to know which buttons to press.
You scroll between funny videos and once in a while you get something that maybe will anger you, or maybe scare and in any way impact what you will do.
Just taking a recent example. To pro Palestinian people they received messages that Harris is bad for Palestine and we can show her and protest by not voting.
Meanwhile the same social media was telling pro Israeli people that they should not vote for Harris, because she is pro Palestine.
This is how they are getting desired outcome. And unlike MSM they can fine tune the message to specific category of people.
Most people in the US do not have the requisite media understanding to navigate social media, or even media, for that matter, without being duped.
This is evident in the growth of the flat earth movement, and other literally idiotic movements.
”and shrug off ~~right wing~~ propaganda" FTFY
Yeah fair enough.
Being influenced / tricked / conned has surprisingly little to do with being 'smart' or 'educated'. Smart people can still be tricked.
A way to manipulate people is to give them plausible (mis)information. What counts as 'plausible' depends on a person's education and interests; but there is always an area of vulnerability at the edges of a person's understanding. That's why there are so many different layers to misinformation campaigns. They are targeting different groups of people. And it is highly dangerous to start believing you can see through them all - because in reality, you only see through the ones that don't target you.
One of the propaganda powers of algorithmically controlled social media is that it is if a user gives up enough of their person info, it makes it possible to automatically target that person with misinformation that is specially suited to their interests, circles of trust, and level of understanding.
... anyway, my point is that although education is always good; it doesn't defeat propaganda outright.
Follow up question: how would this hypothetical educational reform even work? I fully understand that education funding in the US is very much at risk with darth cheeto coming back, but say you managed to creat this curiculum. How would it be different from what we currently have, and do you see a path of reaching it from our current system? (Would it require starting small with charter schools or is it something we could realisticly change with a large bill + funding)
Not trying to be a bother bear, but you proposed a solution so I want to see where the collective would take it.
Honest answer: I have absolutely no idea. I didn't propose a solution per se, other than "change it drastically". And more than just critical thinking skills.
The most important thing is we need a society where the people in power and decision making actually desire this. Our power structures don't want this, as we all know. Keeping us dumb and uninformed, makes us easier to manipulate and control, and do the low paying jobs nobody really wants. Without this we can't even think about major change. Our purpose to "produce and consume" is the foundation for the billionaires wealth.
I don't have any answer on how to teach critical thinking specifically, we need smart people (altruistic, not power seeking or other agendas) to help architect this. All I know is anyone leaving k-12 should graduate with very good critical thinking skills as well as be scientifically literate, reading/writing, other necessities... Our current public education system just seems like an indoctrination to show up to a building 5 days a week to do boring monotonous tasks. My friends and I hated school, and having friends at a young age only made it bearable. Ironically, I and many people love to learn many different topics. I had to learn about this outside of school, how does that make sense? And I'm talking STEM related stuff! Things that are valuable to the capitalism machine!
How about we also emphasize finding individuals' passions and natural skills, and helping them pursue them earlier, in addition to necessities.
I'd love to see some pretty drastic and crazy structural changes as well: imaging removing time as the fixed variable for learning. If you want to learn calculus, you're going to learn the entire curriculum. Instead of getting a B "learning" 80% of the material on the test, you aren't done until you master all of it. You get an A if you do it in 6 weeks. B if 10 weeks, etc. If you still haven't mastered it in a year, you probably should come to the conclusion you're not going to be a mathematician and choose something else... I love this idea but recognize how difficult it would be, how would it even work? This fixed time deadline nonsense is a capitalism thing. I hate it.
None of this matters though unless we get control. We need control first before even thinking about implementation and change.
There's been a right wing media since the 1970's, Xitter has always been an also ran social media site and while Facebook is the largest social media site it's long past it's heyday and is filled primarily with bots and boomers.
You're getting everything backwards. The only reason why Democrats won in the past 50 years is because they have been riding on the their past actual progressive achievements like Social Security, Medicare, Good Stamps, The Civil Rights Act, etc.
Now that they're done nothing but take turns with the GOP destroying those government safety nets there's no goddamn reason for voters to vote for Democrats.
Oh and the whole reason why the right has a strangle hold on media is because of Democratic deregulation of media and telecommunications.
Yeah! People need to go back to trusting good ol cable news! They've never steered us wrong