sunnybunnyNow THAT'S a headline
ExtremeDullardThat’s what happens when Big Tech trap people in information silos and the media manufactures different fake realities depending on the bias of the particular billionaires who happens to own the outlets: people don’t share a common experience anymore and don’t have common facts to agree on. As a result, everybody has their own truths from their own information bubbles and nobody know the actual facts anymore.
I think blaming billionaires for this is incorrect. Look at Lemmy: this place is very much a silo. I’ve been actively participating here for over two years and in that time I have encountered one or two people who supported Trump (the ones posting in /conservative/ before it apparently got taken over). I routinely get called a fascist for being a mainstream Democrat. I’m not complaining (after all, I choose to be here rather than in a more comfortable silo) but clearly being a federated open-source non-profit isn’t solving the problem.
Some billionaires got rich by enabling people to join online silos, but those billionaires were doing what the people wanted already.
LainTrainIdk, people here are definitely on average more sane than on mainstream platforms. This also isn’t to do with big tech or billionaires, it’s the fact that even knowing of Lemmy has a certain intellectual barrier that filters out the non-thinking masses.
There’s a filter but it’s not necessarily a “sanity” filter. People on here generally seem to put more effort into learning and understanding the causes that they support than the average person on Facebook does, but those causes themselves are often far out of the mainstream and people’s understanding of why someone might disagree with them in good faith is often rather poor.
That’s fair, still, I’d rather talk to “crazy” people who reasoned their way into than “normal” people who got there purely based on vibes.
I can relate a lot more to some guy who reasoned his way into being some horrific “millions must die” ubernazi than anyone who simps for optics like “muh past” or “old building good” or “muh nature” just because they “feel that way” and it’s “just” their “opinion” which is somehow a reason for believing in something rather than a description of belief.
I would hardly consider “one or two trump supporter in two years” a silo, like how many other people you encountered that were less extremists and more capable of dialogue?
Also, lemmy is not immune to tech propaganda, since it cannot be taken in isolation: people will still (albeit probably less intesively) biased by consuming other media, and being mostly a link aggregator rather than a generator of original content, there will still be some bias from the sources. It’s just a place where there’s no omnipotent algorithm so the problem is less grave, but still present.
Look at all this buzz about Gen z going right wing. They are still by and large left wing and yet the news won’t shut up about Tate or whatever