There was an implication in these posts that it would be a net good if "we" could attract journalists to use mastodon specifically.

Now, as I understand it, this dude's job is to make the fediverse seem like a serious contender in the social media sphere, so I can understand why he would want journalists here.

There's a problem with this logic though.

There are journalists here. There are a lot of them, even.

They're just not the same journalists that used twitter or currently use bluesky.

He doesn't want journalists to come to the fediverse and make friends and participate in the community, he wants to replicate Journalist Twitter.

He wants mastodon users to be accepting of and willing to embrace broadcast only users who are unwilling to build a network here.

That's not how the fediverse works. If you want people to see the things you have to say, you have to put in some work to be a person worth seeing.

He said that this problem, the community's unwillingness to embrace AI boosters, was also what kept Black users off of mastodon.

This is pure rage-bait. It's a false equivalence designed to shame people out of dealing substantively with the meat of his argument.

Now, I'm writing about the issue of racism on the fediverse from the perspective of a white admin on a small instance. I've been in this space for almost a decade and I have watched the struggle people of color have faced in the fediverse. I don't claim to be an authority here, and it is possible that I have misunderstood something.

That being said, Mastodon doesn't have a large Black userbase, because the network has a massive racism problem.

Part of that problem is the hundreds of rogue nazi instances that spring up and get hammered back every few months, but that's not the Bulk of the problem. A problem like that can be handled by some decent shared moderation tools (which we barely have, and only exist in spite of the efforts of the Mastodon project.)

The bulk of the racism problem on mastodon is a refusal by the volunteer admins and moderation teams that run large instances to learn enough about anti-Black racism to be able to treat it seriously, spot it, and remove the users who engage in it.

(Or, as I have found to be the case on multiple occasions, outright racism on the part of instance admins and moderation teams. Some instances seem all to willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a repeat offender who is white, and extra eager to ban a first time offender who isn't. )

But for an employee of the organization that is supposed to run the Mastodon software project to conflate people who don't like AI with the actual racism problem that his network and software perpetuate, is disgusting.

And I can't think of a reason to do that, unless your goal is to silence criticism.

But, again, I don't want to talk about this dude specifically or the things he said specifically.

I probably already blocked him, and if I haven't I will if he shows up to defend himself here.

I'm not going to provide a platform for that kind of manipulative, abusive nonsense.

I'm here to talk about manipulative and abusive nonsense in general.

Every other social media platform is built around Engagement as the number one metric.

The more interactions you get, the more comments, the more readers, the more views, the better. that's money in your pocket, or at least in the pocket of the people who run your network.

So, people are incentivized to say things that are horrible or otherwise indefensible, to bait you into watching, or responding, or sharing.

To keep them in the conversation, and to engage with the conversation on their terms.

Lots of people do this to try and farm engagement and *usually* it doesn't work very well here.

Part of the reason that it doesn't work very well here is that there is no algorithm here, there are only the things we choose to boost for one another to see.

We are the algorithm, here, and we can choose to opt out of these kinds of discussions by simply not engaging with them.

That's why I'm having this conversation out here, and not in the replies to his thread. I don't need him to know that what he said was vile. That doesn't help me prevent other people from falling for it.

This rage bait + false equivalence + outrageous claim that is quickly tampered by a more reasonable and defensible claim pattern is a propaganda technique.

It's what paid trolls do to stir the pot, and push people towards more extreme viewpoints. It is the way Joe Rogan makes his living.

(Outrageous claim or rage-bait gets taken out of context, then you go watch/listen to find out what the context is. Or you don't, and you just argue the contextless version, and his supporters who have listened to the context don't try to defend the Bailey, they fall back to the more defensible Motte and change the terms of the conversation, and in the process make you seem like you're trying to put words in someone's mouth!

Granted, those are words that person said and it's reasonable for you to want to engage with people on the terms that they set.

But, to some folks, it makes you look unreliable and makes Joe Rogan or whoever else look more reliable by comparison.)

These techniques work because we pay attention to them.

When JD Vance says "I think UFOs are actually Demons" he gets your attention and he gets to control the conversation for the next five minutes.

When he tampers that with "I mean, every faith around the world for all of human history has had a concept of some kind of spirit or unseen force, and maybe this is just a continuation of that, just things that we don't understand yet" then you get to look like you've lost touch with reality when you try to engage substantively with the fact that he said UFOs are demons.

He gets all the benefits of making the demon connection in the minds of his followers (those benefits being "There is a literal war happening between good and evil, god and the devil, and I as the vice president of the united states understand that, and I can tell you who the demons are") and that's a fucking powerful thing to be able to do.

But he gets those benefits while also immediately re-framing and softening the conversation, forcing anyone who tries to engage with what he's said to deal with the much more defensible "There have always been things in the world that we don't understand"

We are in the middle of a propaganda war.

People on all sides are trying to play us against one another to prevent us from realizing that we have more in common with one another than with those over us.

The rich and powerful are trying to prevent us from uniting in solidarity.

They are doing this by spreading narratives of racism and transphobia and homophobia and religious prophecy and whatever else is convenient to turn groups of working people against one another.

Those same techniques are being used by less rich and powerful people to try to command our attention and to buy themselves more influence and control, or to eek out a few more dollars from the platforms that have equated engagement with dollars.

Most of the people who are engaging in the propaganda war are not benefiting from it, or only benefiting from it by default.

Youtube, instagram, tiktok, and facebook have become the grounds of the battle, and most of the participants are just trying to make a little money, and eek out an existence on the outskirts of capitalism.

We built a machine that makes anyone and everyone a potential source of valuable propaganda, because well crafted propaganda can make them money.

That is to say that lots of people who are engaging in propaganda techniques don't even realize that's what they're doing.

They're just trying to make a living in a system that rewards propaganda techniques.

We're not immune to those techniques here, but we are better defended from them than a user on, say, facebook.

It's important, though, to be able to recognize them and to learn how to handle them.

(In most cases, the handle part is:

- don't engage
- block (and report when reporting is appropriate.)
- If someone you know has gotten sucked into the "debate", consider trying to extract them from it.
- If you feel like taking the heat, call it out after the fact.)

So, when you see someone make an outrageous claim (especially if they then retreat to a more defensible one) or a false equivalence or an obvious attempt at rage-bait, please stop and consider what they will gain from your response before you reply.

Will it cause more people to see their original argument? Will it lend credence to the things that they've said?

Will it actually serve to change their mind? (Sometimes the answer is yes! I've had many very productive conversations on this platform that started with the basic "If I interpret this the way it sounds, the two of us will never interact again, can we unpack it and figure out if that's really what you mean?")

On the fediverse especially, but on *every* social media platform to a greater or lesser extent, the things that other people see are determined by how much time and energy you put into the things you see.

Lift folks up. Share good things. Give oxygen to good things.

We don't have to talk about prominent British transphobes and their problematic media, or american mega corporations and their mediocre reboots that they use specifically to avoid paying royalties to animators.

We can instead talk about @dilmandila and his short films ( https://tv.dilstories.com/c/shortfilms/videos ) and documentaries ( https://tv.dilstories.com/c/documentaries/videos ).

The things we give our time and attention to will grow.

Outrage and Misinformation are tempting targets, but we're all better served to spend our time elsewhere.

(You can find out about many of the things I do, for example, by clicking through to my profile. I do a lot, and some of it would really benefit from your attention.)

Followup post to add:

Maybe the dude I'm referencing at the top of this doesn't actually work for Mastodon. Some folks pointed out to me that the way his bio is written Implies but does not actually State that he's on the payroll.

It's possible I got that wrong.

I've also seen a few folks who I respect a great deal draw some more direct parallels between the fediverse's racist tendencies and the ways other new communities have struggled to gain traction here.

It's entirely possible that I am wrong to dismiss this argument out of hand. But I still absolutely disagree with the way this argument was used as a smokescreen to shield the original poster from criticism about their more controversial core point.

(Both "journalism" and "racism" were smokescreens in a conversation that was really about being mean to AI boosters, as far as I can tell.)

The rest of this thread, about recognizing the kinds of propaganda tactics that are being used on you, is still 100% valid and I stand by it.