this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
184 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37739 readers
50 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Archived version

Within hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass-stabbings in Southport, a seaside town in northwest England, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati”—a Muslim migrant to the UK—alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.

None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27m impressions on social media.

The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, with nearly 10m followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat”—even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.

One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may be now run out of an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media”—you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are.

[...]

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 73 points 3 months ago (28 children)

I went on FB a while ago just to see how bad it was, and it's so horrible. I know the article is about Twitter, but all social media is like this. Everything everywhere is just bots feeding that everything is scary.

I live in Seattle, and according to any facebook post by bot or person it's just a constant warzone of homeless people and liberals just setting fire and causing crime. It's so disheartening. I have no idea how to fix it either, it's just outright lies, and terrified suburbanites just eat it up.

[–] TheOneCurly@lemm.ee 24 points 3 months ago (7 children)

I tried for a while fighting in my local facebook groups, but it just served to make me mad and didn't put a dent in the constant barrage of nonsense. I started blocking them all and finally just stopped using facebook entirely.

It's sad since those are really the only online groups for my town. I just have no interest in engaging in the local community now.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 21 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Local groups are the absolute worst. I realized exactly what you did, that it's the absolute worst most horrid people in my area all together. Nextdoor was even worse. I remember (no shit) a picture of a black man walking down a sidewalk with a caption "Anyone know why he's here?". I was horrified that my neighbors were like that, just the absolute horrible racism in doing that.

[–] Devi 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

My local nextdoor has an issue with non white people in vans. Like normal builders eating their lunch and Sharon down the road is posting "Anyone know why this man is here? Stayed there for 45 minutes, very suspicious, might be stealing dogs".

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I legit chuckled at the ending. Because that is exactly how they write comments. Some stupid fucking thing in their brain, "Black people steal dogs". They heard somewhere that a dog went missing and their critical thinking skills go "The boogeyman black person obviously did it"

[–] TheRtRevKaiser 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's practically a guarantee that this Sharon's dog is the most obnoxious, poorly trained little shit to ever walk the earth on four legs, too. Nobody wants your fucking dog, Sharon, it's an unholy terror.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

Sadly there are dog fighting rings and the little yappy dogs get stolen all the time for bait…

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

People with too much time. My wife had a busy kid drop off/pickup / work schedule. If she was done work early she would park a block away from school and sleep in the car till dismissal time...some Karen came out complaining she can't sleep in her car and needed to leave. lol

[–] Devi 7 points 3 months ago
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (23 replies)