• Good news! If you can get the person you wish to punch to get one of those haptic feedback vests, wear it on their face, and then meet them in a compatible game like Pavlov VR, you can punch them in the face over TCP/IP! 😃

  • Riskable@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    I can’t help but wonder if it’s 80% from old, Republican women because there just aren’t as many old, Republican men. They don’t live as long as Democrats:

    https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/study-finds-widening-gap-in-death-rates-between-us-areas-that-vote-for-democratic-rather-than-republican-party/

    (Yes, it’s true: Republicans policies and lifestyles literally result in more unnecessary/early deaths… It’s right there)

    Or it could be that old, Republican men still haven’t figured out how to copy & paste a URL or use the share/retweet buttons 🤷

    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      In my experience old Republican men generally have some hobbies, in my area it tends to be hot rodding. But old Republican women not so much, so they end up playing shitty facebook games and posting shit.

      • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I think it’s more that old republican men don’t like the internet, just going off my dad and his age group at the church I grew up in they all think it’s a waste of time or a communist plot. For reference these men are in their late 60s

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          It may vary by region as well. Most old dudes in my area arent all that religious unless their Mormons or some shit, they just want to do their own things.

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It has certainly been a massive waste of time for me, I see where they are coming from there TBH.

          • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            You ain’t wrong, but these same guys still pay their bills with checks in the mail so I don’t think I’m gonna give them much credit on that point

    • ZeroCool@vger.socialOP
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      5 months ago

      Yep, lemmy isn’t even immune to it. There’s only something like 34k MAU on this side of the fediverse yet we’re still under a constant barrage of misinformation. politics@lemmy.world isn’t any better than reddit’s r/politics in that regard. The mods here, if I’m being generous with my interpretation, labor under the same misguided sense of “impartiality” that allows misinformation to thrive there.

      We’ve got one user posting anti-Biden nonsense 24/7 while tossing in just enough “actual” news for plausible deniability… And it works. I don’t even have to name any names, if you’ve been on lemmy for the last year and paying attention to political subs, I guarantee you already know who I’m referring to.

        • ZeroCool@vger.socialOP
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          5 months ago

          Oh I did that months ago. But I’m not gonna shy away from calling out active propagandists spreading misinformation and the mods for allowing it.

      • Rimu@piefed.social
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        5 months ago

        Both those guys are banned instance-wide on the instance I run.

        Disinfo research was a hobby of mine for a few years so I have zero tolerance for it.

        • Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          So I’ve got a buddy of mine who is really, really interested in doing some sort of media project re: fighting disinfo campaigns - like to the point that he’s scheduling calls with me to help talk him through this, after not talking for years.

          I don’t know shit, approach disinfo by ignoring 90% of what I see online, and am trying to help narrow him down into something actionable.

          Any advice? Like, literally anything - at this point I’m starting from a “What is disinfo v. misinfo, and what are organizations concerned about disinfo in a broad sense saying about the topic” position.

          Edit: Media project - started out as “a podcast maybe”, now he thinks longform mediums aren’t an effective strategy and is talking Tik Tok videos or something. My concern is this is just adding to the noise we all dig through that disinfo benefits from. He still hasn’t given me ideas re: a particular topic, think he’s just frustrated about some close people to him getting deep into COVID/QAnon conspiracies and not responding to anything he tried re: getting well-sourced info in front of them - there was always some bullshit counterpoint.

          Apologies for the novel - want to help him out but a little stuck.

          • Rimu@piefed.social
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            5 months ago

            IMO getting a bit into the psychology of why people want to believe this crap is pretty key. Narcissism, cognitive bias…

            Check this out https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon. Go into the ‘sources’ folder and start clicking around. A lot of the disinfo sites are in separate files but https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon/blob/master/sources/default.txt contains most of them in a big disorganized pile.

            Also take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/ to understand the human cost at the individual & family level.

            Google “Alt-right pipeline” to learn about how they’ve intentionally crafted a radicalization process. Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g.

            • Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Thanks man! This is helpful.

              When we talked last, I was talking about the social aspects (crudely understood) of it all - have general mistrust of experts, poor life situation, feelings of, or acutal, social isolation -> find people who seem to have a privileged knowledge others don’t that you agree with, make them your tribe -> have a position in a social group, slowly introducing you to more and more outlandish ideas -> repeat points to recruit others to the tribe and signal social value to said.

              So agree totally with learning about how this stuff works from psychology and human weakness POV being a vital starting point. Appreciate it!

              • Rimu@piefed.social
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                5 months ago

                Yeah that’s pretty much it. Then that gets amplified by recommendation algorithms and toxic social media ecosystems, of course.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    A pair of studies published Thursday in the journal Science offers evidence not only that misinformation on social media changes minds, but that a small group of committed “supersharers,” predominately older Republican women, were responsible for the vast majority of the “fake news” in the period looked at

    Fucking Karens…

    They’re traced it back to a little over 2,000 registered US voters, but about 1/20 Americans followed at least one of them on social media?

    That’s insane, I figured there’d be more Kenvin Bacons in there rather than that many directly following the most popular misinformation spreaders.