If you set up parental controls on your parent’s devices I can guarantee they won’t find a way around it.
They will, usually by accident. Source: my father in law.
My mom mentioned that my dad has been watching some concerning (in her words, “annoying”) YouTube content lately. Last time she said that it was America’s Got Talent, but this time it’s white men arguing with cops. I visited and asked if he would show me. He jokingly said “are you gonna violate my rights?” And I very seriously said “yes. I need to make sure it’s not Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or someone even worse”. He got a little bit offended and said “you know me better than that, I’m smarter than that”. But the thing is, you start by watching something innocuous like some idiot sovcit arguing with cops and the algorithm pipeline feeds you nazi shit from there and you don’t even know it.
For context, my parents are the kind of leftists that don’t know what leftists are. My mom calls herself a bleeding heart liberal, and my dad sees the media say things like “radical liberals” and jumps up off the couch screaming “you bet your ass im a radical liberal!” But they’re left of liberal, they just don’t have the language for it.
I’m not worried that my dad is gonna seek out nazi propaganda, im worried it’s gonna find him anyway and I want to throw his phone in a lake.
Maybe shower thoughts wasn’t the right community for me to have my existential crisis. But I wish i could block “sovcit” on my dad’s phone and “trad-anything” on my mom’s phone, not because I think they’re dumb (okay maybe a little) but because this shit is so toxic and intrinsic and scary and my parents are so dumb.
Take care of yourself and your loved ones xx
I was interested in Diablo IV when it was released which, after a few videos, led YouTube to recommend Asmondgold. I watched one or two of his videos and the next thing I know my feed is full of maga and manosphere trash. Most of it had innocuous titles and thumbnails but a few minutes in I was being bombarded with lies, bad faith arguments, logical fallacies. Don’t even get me started with where funny Garand Thumb videos will lead. All I could think of was how Al Queda and ISIS recruited people with videos posted online.
EDIT: For the most part, I liked Asmondgold, but the algorithm leads from him to very dark places.
Same thing happened with me and Shadiversity. I like medieval stuff and fantasy so i thought he’d be interesting.
Noooope. Just another fash scumbag.
Imo Asmongold is good to mid, until he starts getting political, then it plummets into awful. Also yeah I think the garand thumb to far right pipeline is very real, the guy is actually quite extreme iirc.
Must be nice to have parents that haven’t turned out to be fascist sociopaths.
Why do you stigmatize Joe Rogan and others? There’s nothing wrong with watching people who you diagree with.
I don’t usually feed the trolls, but I’m going to engage w you as if you were being genuine.
I used to watch Joe Rogan w my ex. My ex was a Bernie Bro. It turned into Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. Now he dates women 10 years younger than him and I live with a roommate and am paying off his luxury car that I co-signed for him that has since been repossessed. He kicked me out of the apartment that I paid for because “he couldn’t stand to share his bed with me anymore” because Andrew tate told him he could do better than me. Look, people break up for lots of reasons. We weren’t a good match from the start. But the idea that he’s some high value alpha and I’m a used up ho is just so fucking silly, it was the stupidest most embarrassing way for my 7 year relationship to have ended.
It’s important to hear the opinions of people who disagree with you if they are being genuine. Joe Rogan and the rest are not good faith people. They are promoting disinformation and hate. And I think you are too.
I watched my dad end a lifelong friendship because the friend got sucked down the right wing garbage chute. He has not rebounded from his loss, but he can’t tolerate that friendship and just “not talk abt politics” around the guy.
Be better, my dear. I will not respond again.
There’s plenty wrong with credulous dipshits who give lying propagandists and conmen a platform.
WhY wOnT yOu cHaLlEnGe YoUrSeLf in tHe mArKeTpLaCe oF iDeAs? I’m jUsT aSkINg qUeStIoNs!
JAQing off, if you will.
Trash should be treated as trash.
Calling bad faith. The Rogan-stans tend to hide behind “he let’s anyone on his show regardless of his feelings”, while failing to acknowledge that he’s platforming some heinously evil and/or stupid people (apparently Andrew fucking Tate is lined up to be on there soon) and just signs off on whatever crazy they spout (looks at Jordan Peterson). He’s abdicated all responsibility for giving some awful people a platform and good PR.
It’s not about disagreement, it’s about responsibility for who uses your platform. If he grilled them like an investigative journalist or meaningfully debated them in any way, we could talk. But this fucker would have Andrew Wakefield on and just be like “oh yeah, vaccines are evil”.
I constantly refer to my parents and in-laws as children. Why? Because they behave exactly like my 11 year old. They have no critical reasoning skills, no emotional intelligence, are easily offended, and can not be reliability left on their own without screwing something up.
At some point around retirement age, humans seem to cognitively revert back to children and those of us in middle adulthood are left to parent our actual children and our childish parents.
Unfortunately I think that’s just our parents and not all old people. My parents are the same way, but it seems to me more that maturing is a choice and active process that requires effort, and many people are unwilling to put in the work and vigilance required and it leads to the above
I don’t think they’re children, I think they’re selfish lazy assholes, but the result that they need to be treated like children is the same
At some point around retirement age, humans seem to cognitively revert back to children
I haven’t seen that happen to everyone I know around that age. Many still have their wits about them and see the current state of affairs as a clown show. Some are even out here on the streets protesting.
At some point around retirement age, humans seem to cognitively revert back to children and those of us in middle adulthood are left to parent our actual children and our childish parents.
Is this true, or is this just (mostly) boomers?
I just keep their Facebook accounts logged in on my phone. Every few months, I will go onto their profiles and unlike pages like “Wear your poppy with pride” and deradicalize their algorithm. Poppies for British boomers on Facebook are like Elsa and Spiderman on YouTube for babies.
How are poppies radical on Facebook?
Because the wearing of poppies has become synonymous with the now defunct BNP and the rest of the British right wing for a lot of us.
You can thank Stephen Yaxley-Lennon for that.
That’s a bit silly. The symbol has existed as one of remembrance for over 100 years. We shouldn’t let fascists take claim of it
Although I take this to mean that the ‘poppy pages’ are actually fronts for bigotry?
Of course it’s silly.
It’s also silly that people get upset at a bunch of Asian countries who still use the swastika. But a lot of people outside the cultures instantly think of Nazis.
We shouldn’t be getting upset at swastikas being used within their asian context.
Correct.
They are where you’ll find the deeply ignorant, xenophobic, Daily Mail readers frothing at the mouth and red in the face with anger over how “forriners” are lazy criminals that come here to claim benefits for them and their 16 kids, while simultaneously stealing all the jobs and homes from “hard working British families” (read: “British benefit claimants out of work and living in grothole housing owned by a local slumlord”).
Facebook slowly pushing more shit and you shoveling the shit away. Nicely done!
south park did it.
And they all started playing Minecraft unironically.
Love that episode.
i do, too, but their portrayal of minecraft was hilariously bad
I would whole-heartedly support this.
no, WE THE PEOPLE should have global networks that simply remove that kind of brain rot and delete the people that perpetuate it.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think we should kill large amounts of people just because they follow a different political ideology than us. 🙄 We have to be better than these extremists to truly show them a better way…
… I think he meant delete accounts, not delete actual people, but I could be wrong lol
If so, I don’t think they would have 2 different verbs: “remove that kind of brain rot and delete the people that perpetuate it.”
there’s only one way to fix idiots and sociopaths.
XXX. incorrect. this is the kind of thinking that has allowed our civilization to fester. we tolerate the people who actively bring suffering into the world. we resist progress to appease an ignorant faction of the population. we sacrifice our collective future on an altar of liberty, all the while deluding ourselves into thinking that allowing this continued suffering is somehow ‘taking the high road’. BULLSHIT. taking the high road is nipping our problems in the bud.
the damage we would do now to eradicate the illogical mental contagion that is religion pales in comparison to the gains of untold future generations living in a near utopia (which is completely possible when you remove idiots from control and let informed science guide humanity).
Tolerate and slaughter aren’t the only options.
educate and build a compassionate society is obviously the correct answer, but we can’t do that because there is a portion of society that will never let that happen. remove the roadblocks. anything less is being complicit in prolonged suffering.
“We can build our utopia, we just have to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with us” doesn’t sound very right in my ears. It sounds like something where one should ask “are we the baddies?”
Learn nuance. They’re speaking to the Paradox of Tolerance, not calling for a blind genocide…
Murder is never a valid solution to the Paradox of Tolerance.
So, you mean like childish controls?
I wish I could do that with my own and from what I can tell my algorithms don’t even put them in as much as other folks.
Any time you hear Republicans argue 18 year olds shouldn’t be able to vote, and they want to increase the age to 21/25, tell them “OK - then anybody over 65 isn’t allowed to vote either.”
I would settle for no one can be elected if their age is younger or older than 30 and 60.
There already is a lower limit (must be 35), just need to add the upper
Lol. What controls?
Simpler still: disenfranchise senile boomers. Of course you don’t target boomers specifically, any old person with very little time left to live and severe disconnect from reality shouldn’t be allowed to vote on what affects the rest of the world long after they are dead.
severe disconnect from reality
Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. Seeing how far the definition of an “illegal alien” is being stretched for deportation, I have a feeling people with autism, ADHD, depression, etc, would all be added to the list of people who are “disconnected from reality”
Not to mention some people are dumb enough to argue being trans is a mental illness aswell. (
dysphoria isNVM it’s a diagnosis, being trans is not)The better solution imo is to inform people about what’s going on around them and how to watch out for pipelines.
That’s what router settings do. Sorry, X is not reachable from here.
I love this in general, unfortunately for me my dad is a retired network engineer 😫
He still shouldn’t be able to circumvent a solid password. Sure, if the cell has signal, the home wifi settings won’t matter, but…
You’d have to cut off VPN, SSH, and proxies, too, and to stop a really slippery network person from getting around that, you’d have to inspect protocol, not just block ports.
Yea, true. There are also plenty of external DNS servers, so pretty hosed anyways without controlling the devices they use directly.
Solid password of what? The router admin panel? On the router that is physically in his home? He can just factory reset that router, and presto… Password is gone.
I’m so tired of this rampant paternalism across society. It’s exhausting.
paternalism
Whenever I see someone complaining about this on the internet, I imagine they’re an angsty teenager mad that their mom doesn’t let them get a face tattoo.
Yeah, you’re aware of the definition of paternalism then. That’s the whole point of authoritarianism. The leadership does not believe the people can trusted to run their own lives, and treats the entire population as disobedient teenagers.
That’s the whole point of authoritarianism.
Lol no. You could say paternalism is authoritarian, but not the other way around. Authoritarianism is just about power.
But as an aside, would you mind sharing your age? You don’t need to be specific, just say if you’re over or under 18. I have a… theory about people who obsess over the concept of “paternalism”.
All paternalism is authoritarian. Not all authoritarianism is paternal.
Middle aged. Your theory sounds bunk.
How do you propose to counteract the spread of facism through the internet?
The same way we fight it in the physical world. With debate and education and engagement.
Wild that you would express concern with spreading of fascism while advocating for technocracy. You don’t oppose fascism- you just have a preferred flavor of it.
With debate and education and engagement.
the algorithms will not show them to nearly as many consumers as it does with fascist content
Yes, we need more regulation of companies, and what they push. Not people.
This I agree with. However, I disagree with debating fascists. They don’t debate in good faith. Their aim in any debate is to wear you down by spewing more lies than you have the time or energy to debunk.
The point isn’t to convert the fascist. It’s to humiliate them and expose them in front of everyone else.
You can’t humiliate someone who has no shame. And with their firehose of falsehoods, you’ll only expose a small portion of their lies by the time they’ve already moved on. Nothing productive comes from waging a war of words with people who don’t believe in the words that come out of their own mouth.
Debate, education and engagement take time.
The algorithm is instantaneously ready with the next easily digestible bit of content to send you further down the rabbit hole into radicalization.
I worry that we need a more instantaneous cure in our current information environment.
“Instantaneous cure” sounds like you’re suggesting something super fucked up.
I’m not, really. I just don’t think we have the luxury of taking the amount of time that we would need to educate people thoroughly enough to counteract the algorithm.
Probably what we need is a limitation on free speech where blatant misinformation is involved. In the same way that shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre is harmful, so is repeating false claims to stir political discord.
The eagerness to censor people, and not the companies pushing the shit, is such peak fascist bootlicking behavior.
Yes, let’s normalize censorship.
If the majority of people cannot handle information on their own, how can we maintain democracy?
Are senior cititzens more stupid? Otherwise how do we know that we believe the right things, and not just what is acceptable by the mainstream which will change for the next generation?
