This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion.
I’m not even talking about necessarily in this community directly, however in a lot of other spaces I’ve noticed a lot of accounts using divisive language and terms like “The ineffectual left” “single issue voters” “ignorant right wing morons”. Lots of straw man arguments, lots of willful ignorance.
I’m not a centrist, I’m very very very far left however I know well enough not to patently dismiss the talking points of others, outside of course calls to genocide. I know what dog whistles sound like, and I’m hearing a lot of them lately.
Most egregiously I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.
So I guess my question is, how’re we all fairing with what might be the largest Turing test ever?
Don’t forget, there is a large and worldwide vested interest in maintaining online divisiveness.
The internet has become our global hearth. The grand majority of humanity participate in the internet to communicate with each other for conversation, connectedness, and social expression.
This is very bad for authoritarian regimes, whether they are currently in power or attempting to enter into power or attempting to expand their power.
Should someone do something that is considered “bad”, information about that will spread around the world as fast as a lie ever could.
To prevent that from hampering their schemes, the smart thing to do would be to poison the source. If you hate everyone on the internet because you have been effectively compromised by psychological poison, then you will not trust the people on the internet that you communicate with when they tell you something bad has happened.
Therefore, the mote of power you could add to collective action is rendered ineffective.
And, the interesting thing is they don’t have to fool everybody. They only have to fool enough of us that our own internal division prevents effective action.
I never really believed in a devil growing up, but if I did believe in a devil now, I would definitely say that this is one of his activities.