> This is really fascinating. As someone who reads a lot of history and historical fiction I think this is really intriguing. Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, where they don’t know the “end of the story”.
Having the facts from the era is one thing, to make conclusions about things it doesn't know would require intelligence.
The term free speech is misleading. It is really freedom of speech. I.e. someone who says something doesn't have to be afraid of prosecution because of what they said.
It isn't the speech that is being protected it is the person who says it.
Using the term "free speech" creates those weird scenarios where now we have someone argue that the US Constitution mandates ads to be everywhere.
If you can put any person 12 years and up in jail without a trial, and you don't care about accidentally hurting innocent ones I'm surprised it is 2.5 per 100,000 and not 0 per 100,000.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its president now is serving second term which is not allowed by their constitution.
Yeah. Everyone is convinced ads don't work on them, yet somehow it is a trillion dollar industry.
Perhaps you are lucky and don't have anyone in your family affected by disinformation.
I have family members that no longer watch TV, listen radio, read news papers. All "news" they are getting is from sources that also tell them that all other sources lie.
They live in complete different reality that it is a distorted mirror of actual reality.
Or election were hacked, but not the way you think.
Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality. Each person gets a personalized feed that presses their buttons to think certain way.
For example with war in gaza.
If for example you were pro Israeli, you will see content that Harris was siding with Hamas, and trump actually was the most Israel friendly candidate.
If you were supporting Palestine you would get that there's no difference between Harris and trump, and it is best to do protest vote.
Same with leaning too much to the left, or not enough to the left etc.
Pretty much every issue was handled this way. People who got their news from social media had no idea what her stance were on any topic, because that was filtered.
Few years ago we had huge scandal about Cambridge Analytica, there was a bit loud about it and then died out, meanwhile it all continued and was perfected.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook manipulated older generation. While TikTok managed to capture younger, left leaning generation and make it more apathetic.
I don't think it is a coincidence that pretty much all social media (except the Chinese TikTok) was present on his inauguration.
I also don't think it is a coincidence that all social media companies have involvement with AI. With it, they no longer need humans to generate content, so the whole manipulation is much easier to do.
This isn't just isolated to US and it is being used in Europe too. Look at elections in Moldova, Romania, what's happening in Germany etc.
Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century" book is a must read so we can prevent this.
He uses bots (or some PR agencies) everywhere to promote his image, I see it personally on Facebook, on Reddit, but it is on all social media. This is how everyone think he is an engineer, a genius and turns even his failures (like hyperloop) as a successes.
I wouldn't be surprised that they would have few here too.
It's the same in Software Engineering, lol. If your service just works no one cares. If you instead have a flaky service, but step in to save the day then you become a hero :)
Though I agree somewhat that politicians don't have as much incentive, but this is what regulations are for. Someone said that regulations are written in blood, because they are results of "lessons learned".
It doesn't help that then those regulations are frequently removed to help businesses and the cycle repeats.
A lot of people who talk about massive gains seem to forget about code review.
Then in a company someone who has to review is is f*cked because that code is much more complex and takes much longer to review.