Maybe much of what you see if a Psyops to divide people to keep them infighting.
It was written in manuals by the CIA and KGB over five decades ago, before we even had an internet, how you can destabilize a democratic nation’s social discourse and undermine elections simply by creating a small group of agents who can slip into every major social debate or issue and immediately take the most extreme positions on both sides of every issue.
This creates and draws in contentious debate and arguing about the most radical extremes of every position until the average citizen tunes out of the debate, stops trusting what’s real, and just defaults to whatever state-media says is real because there’s no other option that makes sense.
That’s not to say the CIA and KGB were primarily responsible for the erosion of our society, the people doing this have been from all over the world and right inside the USA’s borders, each trying to do it for different reasons and agendas, but also each succeeding in creating a massive middle-class population with zero interest in following politics and social issues. The 2024 exit polling backs this up, showing that most Trump voters had no clue what Trump represented or what his policies were, despite it being his second term.
We get tunnel vision in places like reddit or lemmy and forget that for most people, their news comes from either nightly network television while distracted and cooking for their family, or from 30 minutes of browsing Facebook memes on a sunday night while preparing for another 6 days of working 10 hours a day.
And it’s still going on, and yes right here in Lemmy has PLENTY of these sock-puppets, astroturfers and bad-faith shills, as well as bots, designed to invade posts with wild takes and stupid derails in order to make people argue, so casual browsers start scrolling past the mess and lose interest in the issue.
It was written in manuals by the CIA and KGB over five decades ago, before we even had an internet, how you can destabilize a democratic nation’s social discourse and undermine elections simply by creating a small group of agents who can slip into every major social debate or issue and immediately take the most extreme positions on both sides of every issue.
This creates and draws in contentious debate and arguing about the most radical extremes of every position until the average citizen tunes out of the debate, stops trusting what’s real, and just defaults to whatever state-media says is real because there’s no other option that makes sense.
That’s not to say the CIA and KGB were primarily responsible for the erosion of our society, the people doing this have been from all over the world and right inside the USA’s borders, each trying to do it for different reasons and agendas, but also each succeeding in creating a massive middle-class population with zero interest in following politics and social issues. The 2024 exit polling backs this up, showing that most Trump voters had no clue what Trump represented or what his policies were, despite it being his second term.
We get tunnel vision in places like reddit or lemmy and forget that for most people, their news comes from either nightly network television while distracted and cooking for their family, or from 30 minutes of browsing Facebook memes on a sunday night while preparing for another 6 days of working 10 hours a day.
And it’s still going on, and yes right here in Lemmy has PLENTY of these sock-puppets, astroturfers and bad-faith shills, as well as bots, designed to invade posts with wild takes and stupid derails in order to make people argue, so casual browsers start scrolling past the mess and lose interest in the issue.