alt Hacker NewsYou: Other people are unhinged hyperbolists. Here, let me characterize them hyperbolically to prove it, therefore I am the calm rational one and by the way, civilization may collapse and the CIA might be behind this.
I mean wtf. Is this your parody account?
Replies
You see, you're doing the thing.
Every bit of hyperbole I mentioned is practically quoted verbatim from some thread or another here, it is what people believe, and you can't even bring yourself to approach me in good faith because I've committed wrongthink by defending the existence of social media even implicitly.
The CIA and other governments are running influence campaigns across social media. The links between the major social media platforms and intelligence agencies are well known and well documented. And civilization is threatened by numerous factors, such as our over-investment in AI and the mass deskilling and destabilization that will create, creeping fascism and increasing political violence in a multipolar world, climate change leading to mass famine, pandemics in a post-scientific age, etc.
But people want to destroy social media (and by extension, want to destroy the freedom of communication it allows) rather than bother to consider that the real problem is the same problem we've always had - government and corporate interests trying to control our lives and manufacture consent through fear and panic.
They ran the same playbook prior to social media but the process was so normalized because they controlled so much of the media and culture that no one really even noticed it. Now people notice but they can't distinguish between the symptom and the disease.
If thinking CIA manipulates social media and the world is currently in deep trouble is extremism, count me in the 3.1% already, buddy.