MEDIAWATCH: Twitter bigotry, Bluesky smugness and Facebook’s social media hate algorithms – we all despise each other now

Meta removing fact checking will have ‘catastrophic consequences’ – disinformation expert

Experts are concerned changes to content moderation and an end to third-party fact checking on social media platform Meta will leave users open to abuse and disinformation.

The Daily Blog has had many posts (usually ones critical of Israel) challenged and removed by Facebook’s fact check policy so we know first hand the ease with which that process has been weaponised, but dumping Fact Checkers altogether to create a mob editorial committee so that social media hate algorithms become the de facto voice of truth is dangerously unhinged at a time when Social Media and excruciating loneliness is corroding actual reality alongside Democratic Institutions that require good faith citizens instead of bitter cynical patriots.

The ease with which full blown conspiracy theories will be set alongside truth and promoted on platforms with the ubiquity of Facebook will propel polarisation into new extremes.

Because social media is now so ubiquitous, everyone has seen flameouts and vicious knife fights on contentious issues in their timelines and that activist screaming you are a Transphobic, Racist, Sexist, Vaccine-peddling, Satanic pedophile is enough for you to personally hate and be hurt and align yourself against that activist regardless of policy.

That’s ‘proxification’.

It wasn’t Trump saying outrageous things that attracted angry reactionary white working class vote, it was the intense reaction by middle class woke activists to Trump whom they had been insulted by that made the election so febrile.

Voters cut their noses off to spite their face because it angered people they despised.

We need to be on social media platforms that aren’t just padded echo chambers.

Threads and Bluesky allow you to curate your feed so much so that you never have to feel challenged or threatened by a different opinion.

I don’t think that helps anyone.

Sure, Social Media Hate Algorithms have filled Elon’s Town Square with Neo-Nazis and Brownshirts and Troll Bot Farms that swarm to curry favour and shape opinion alongside manufactured disinformation and misinformation, but I won’t lock myself away in a padded echo chamber because you don’t win debates in echo chambers and you don’t change anyones mind in an echo chamber.

I’m staying on Twitter and Facebook because engaging with people who don’t agree with you is activism!

Unfortunately feelings over ride reason and we are now just agreeing or disagreeing with feelings and seeing as social media has made us all unforgivable in the eyes of the puritanical woke and the unhinged right, there is a need to use the few tools at our disposal to generate solidarity to stop the unhinged Right from selling us all out to their rich mates.

We no longer have the luxury of pure temple politics.

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