alt Hacker NewsSame reason as always: Wealthy people want less taxes, more power, and will lobby for the parties that always promise less taxes: Those on the right.
The problem is that the conservative and traditional right aren't too popular, so they need to go for the far-right. Those parties are in full MAGA-mode, focusing on things like immigration. It is so, so much easier to sway public opinion by blowing up incidents involving immigrants, than to convince the public that they should accept reduction or degradation of services due to tax cuts.
Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth, and face zero consequences. And those lies will propagate through social media, and people will accept them as facts.
It seems like critical thinking among huge parts of the population is considerably down. I've heard seemingly smart people I know regurgitate lies they've picked up on social media, which they could have fact checked in 30 seconds.
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> Far-right politicians discovered some time ago that they can straight up lie through their teeth
Please when we're that far from normalcy and courteous discourse it's "far of center" politicians. Last week forget all the extreme climate nonsense (the world is still here and just getting worse not disappearing tomorrow) and anti nuclear nonsense that is finally being rolled back under plans to actually build green(er) infrastructure. Of course that's always matched by "organized immigrants are coming for your babies future jobs in macdonald's" or whatever is being spouted by the extreme right.
"Everything means less than zero" (E. Costello)
Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.
For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.
As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.