Cambridge Analytica was well underway in 2013, now 10 years ago. People like to think that just because researchers find x on Twitter and y on Facebook - that that is the clearly documented cases - that the tactics and general psychology didn’t copy everywhere.
Cambridge Analytica is mostly famous for Facebook… but I don’t view their direct targeting of individuals to be the long-term damage. The long-term damage is that they legitimized psycological manipulation, falsehoods, as a form of winning audiences. The were Psychology/Psychiatry professionals who applied human history and experience towards making people believe false things. Like a rebirth of Dr. AA Brill from 1929 on a new scale. The legitimization of it without any ethical uprising…
https://kbin.social/m/offtopic@lemmy.nz/t/432318/Is-it-just-me-or-has-Lemmy-become-more-negative
On Reddit it became extremely popular to hate on Facebook by 2015, but very few would discuss why or how. It isn’t as if Reddit was advertising-free and didn’t have documented cases of grass-roots exploitation. The code and management of Reddit put a huge amount of time into trying to prevent vote manipulation (and make it a trade secret) - where none of that seems to be going on with ActivePub platforms. People notice where Reddit fails, but they don’t seem to notice how hard the problem really is to solve when nobody cares about real identity.
Facebook people mostly used real names, real houses, real photos with their family. Reddit seems to really hate that for the mainstream audience, and that carries over to Lemmy in 2023.
People don’t use fake identities to share secrets about companies by name, instead more often than not fake identities are used to pump garbage and copy old content and present it as new.
It’s funny how when people talk about Facebook as bad, they never seem to mention the real identity aspects of many people on it who joined 12 or more years ago. And there is something kind of sick about a society where real identity and real problems have to be hidden to be accepted online. The thugs have kind of won.
YouTube you often know who the person is because so much is presented in the images and audio. Some of the small-time youtubers with only 700 views talking about technical topics are really the kind of sincere and earnest thing that have largely been abandoned.
Surfing memes of billionaires - be it Trump memes from his antics or Hollywood film memes or video games making billions of $ - and their memes… is dangerous. Trump rode on “high energy” and mocks scientific thinking. The crazy shark-frenzy trend-chasing of memes has become the cornerstone of Lemmy.
lemmy has had wave after wave of hate. Hate towards Reddit bring bitter and hate-filled emotions as the central core of Lemmy for many months. And hating on Elon Musk. And hating on this or that. It really has been an emotional Mob Mentality of hating things.
That’s the kind of emotion Cambridge Analytica was spelling out to those who wanted to ‘lead the masses’, aka get votes - was packaging in 2013. Now it’s all just accepted, the constant hate as a ‘fun topic’. Bitching all the time.
There are people with great social skills… but they aren’t becoming leaders away from hate or exploitation of crowds. A social movement towards goodness is long overdue, but it doesn’t seem to take hold.
Christianity in USA has degraded to be almost pure anti-science and out-group hate oriented. Sure, this was there all along since 1492 when it came to Americas from Europe. But it has become notably worse since 2012, and people don’t seem alarmed that groups can be shifted that way… much like Germany in 1930.
There are no easy ways to measure these things, but there are warning signs when entire populations become motivated by hate and mocking.
Clearly people liked many aspects about how Reddit presented information, as an information system. And there has been very little positive discussion on Lemmy about the good and what to keep. It’s mostly been hate-filed expressions of “fuck spez” instead of “what worked well and why anyone cared positively in the first place”.
Reddit 2013 and earlier was very different, 2013 was the year of Cambridge Analytica engaging populations.
25 years ago… When Islamic societies used hate and anger as ways to motivate street gangs, everyday people criticized the hate and anger.
But now it’s become politicians and leaders all over the world in 2023 who are using them - without any need for Islam. Politicians and other leaders have had hate and anger professionally endorsed by Cambridge Analytica medical professionals now for over 10 years.
Again, we used to criticize Islamic people for using hate and anger to form street gangs and followers.