this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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I hate that the extreme polarity of things right now keeps us from having the important conversations surrounding the kernels of truth within people’s mistrust and dissatisfaction.
It is a fact that the government has made a habit of lying to people. It is a fact that the cover of medical experimentation has been used to justify atrocities against minorities within the last 100 years.
However, it is not true that @JoeTruth1488 on 4Chan is likely to have all the answers to a conspiracy in plain sight. It is not true that InfoWars is spitting facts while everyone else is out to get you.
I can understand the mistrust of the system, but I can’t understand the conclusion that some anonymous yahoo with no inside perspective somehow has the resources to have figured it all out.
There was always some percentage of the population that believes in that stuff, for a variety of understandable reasons.
That's... fine. It kinda worked.
The problem is social media has amplified those voices by orders of magnitude because they're engaging (hence, profitable). The missing panel above is the FB post, YT segment, podcast (all recommended algorithmically) or whatever that led that guy down the rabbit hole.
In other words, It's not a content problem, but an engagement one.
I definitely agree. I’m old enough to remember when Alex Jones just had his late night radio show in Austin, and he was actually kind of fun back then. It was all about the hollow moon, reptilians, and grey aliens hosting the Bohemian Grove parties. Once he got an internet channel, it was a whole different ballgame.
I miss the days of quaint kooks instead of dangerous kooks.
They make it make sense in the way the reader wants it to make sense.
There is nothing wrong with having a dissenting conclusion from your own observations, but accepting some internet creators conclusions as your own without scrutiny is equally as bad or worse than accepting the government lies they say they are rejecting. If they applied the same skepticism to their fringe news sources, we’d be in a better place, I think.
True. However the fringe "influencers" often are the most vocal against the government and usually default as the "voice of reason" by simply being there.
Actual objective and unbiased information needs a visible and relatively trustworthy representative regular people can latch unto. Which is difficult because they will be attacked from all the sides who will be hampered by such a presence.