• 4dpuzzle@beehaw.org
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    11 months ago

    I’m starting to think that Kurzgesagt is either paid media and/or propaganda. I really liked their well researched approach. But this one is straight out in your face. They outright deny the filter bubble that each one of us have experienced firsthand on corporate social media - and then blame you for the ill effects. Also, if you look at the imagery - the emoticons and especially the thumbs up symbol, they are trying to invoke memories of specific social media. It feels very much like they’re trying to garner sympathy for those antisocial-media.

    BTW, this isn’t the first time their motives have been called into question. They have in the past, taken money from bigphrama to paint them as benevolent superheroes.

    • rwhitisissle@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      I don’t know why you would think they’re paid media or propaganda. It’s not like they’ve been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a “philanthropic” organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of “effective altruism,” an ideology which functionally equates to “let’s try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality,” and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It’s also not like they’ve been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.

      Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s