Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

  • Steeve@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    This is a shitty opinion article that links speculation, anecdotal evidence, and “experts” with no actual studies at all. Whether or not they’re doing a good job at it, all of these companies invest heavily in moderation on their platforms, and that investment hasn’t been reduced substantially.

    Everyone hates social media through elections, it’s an easy thing to blame because the loud get louder. This article is punching down early for clicks.

    • Prethoryn Overmind@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I made a comment the other day saying Lemmy users are just as biased as average people.

      Someone said, “how is this article biased.”

      I am convinced half the user base that was here before Reddit doesn’t know they are stuck in a loop of reading and posting articles here that justify their mindset the same as anyone else.

        • PRUSSIA_x86@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Lemmy caters particularly well to the doomer crowd, since it presents an alternative to corporate-owned social media. Doomers have a lot of overlap with leftists(or liberals or whatever), and this causes a feedback loop of depression and anxiety. Consider two people; the leftist and the doomer:

          -The leftist gets mad about something and posts a few articles

          -The doomer sees this and reposts it with a more fatalistic title

          -The leftist sees the new post and becomes more outraged, posting massive walls of enraged text in the comments

          -The doomer reads the first paragraph and begins wailing about how the world is ending

          -This anger spills over into other posts and generally sours the mood for everyone involved

          Because the doomer is incapable of viewing anything in a positive light and the leftist lives in a state of perpetual butthurt, they feed into one another and fill everybody’s feed with outrage and despair.

          Swap the leftist with alt-right and you have 4chan circa 2017. Let it fester for a few years and you have a machine for churning out political extremists.