By now, we should know you CANNOT believe all you see on social media
“Elon Musk’s social media echo chamber X-formerly-Twitter introduced a new feature over the weekend that shows the location where its users have been tweeting from — a move that has exposed an embarrassing problem for the social network: that many of its most politically inflammatory users are actually foreign scammers cashing in on gullible and outrage-hungry Americans. As the New York Times reports, it didn’t take long for online sleuths to notice that accounts that post MAGA ragebait weren’t actually tweeting from the United States; instead, they’re based in Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world, often linked to online scams and schemes.”
Especially if there is an algorithm to be gamed, and one based on outrage or inflaming emotions, then be very wary of actually believing what you see are genuine people. If they're not AI driven bots, they're going to be people click baiting to get viral responses. The behaviour today makes old-fashioned trolling look positively tame by comparison.
I think that for many people, a sense of apathy has set in when using social media. Certainly on the centralised algorithm driven services, it has been many years since I saw any real-life friends or family actually posting anything.
There is hope though in the many decentralised, and better moderated, social media network platforms. They don't have algorithms to game (apart from chronological ordering of posts) and they don't have ads paid for by views, so there is little to drive that sort of behaviour.
Of course there is always the geopolitical angle, with efforts to try to undermine or railroad elections in countries, but again, it is difficult to get a viral foothold without an algorithm driving views. Users are generally just seeing posts from those who they follow.
And on clicks and views, especially on Twitter, as those views are what generates revenue for them from advertisers, it also appears that those may have also been faked from back in the old Twitter days. This according to something mentioned on the Revolution.Social podcast this last week. Before Elon Musk even came along, Twitter saw that faking these numbers could increase their revenue! After Elon Musk took over? Well, we don't know for sure, and maybe he is running it all by the book.
So, we should just remember that on profit-driven social networks which have paid advertising, and where ragebaiting and trolling can easily go viral, not everything you see is going to be true, and maybe there is an attempt to just push your emotional buttons. If you remember this, your visits to some social media platforms may be a lot less stress inducing.
See
Twitter's New Feature Accidently Reveals Something Fascinating About Huge MAGA Influencers
Many of Elon Musk's X's most inflammatory users are actually foreign scammers, according to a new feature introduced by the platform.
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