Right. Some people might be surprised, but they likely won't really care. Lots of people care, but the ones who care are likely thinking "well no duh".
World's dumbest hackers waste once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
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I'm not even mad about this. I just find it hilarious somebody wasted their time doing this. Just goes to show that you have people that have little or nothing to do with their lives. I saw it on the news this morning, and my local news try to treat it as serious business. That just makes it even more hilarious.
That isn't the problem. Never was.
The problem is the people now likely thinking "well no duh" have been called "conspiracy theorists" and "bots" for years, by those who damn well ought to care and damn well ought to know better, who are now likely to say "fake news".
There have been articles about people employed on modest pay to sift through social media's shittier, hate-raddled and abusive posts for blocking and banning, and quite a few of them seem to have ended in therapy. Spending lots of hours a day, every day, reading the worst of human nature turns out to be pretty bad for psychological health, as few people should be really surprised to hear but social media execs mostly couldn't give a damn about.
I presume it’s mostly so a bot farm can’t get “kill Jack Dorsey” trending or stuff like that, but I’d be largely unsurprised if they also use it in a partisan manner.
Hmm, I wonder if tools like this could be used to influence public opinion and possibly even sway elections?
Remember when Trump gave that executive order to look into Twitter?
Edit- the search blacklist, I think I encountered a consequence of that once. A user I occasionally look up but don’t follow because he’s utterly insane wouldn’t show up in the search function for a few months. Might be semi-automated since I doubt Twitter gives a fuck about neo-Wilsonian shitposters.
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Reminds me of something I read a long time ago: That when processing cows, slaughterhouses will limit the number of times per week that an individual fires the bolt gun to kill the animal. Apparently, looking death in the eye extremely frequently isn't all that great for mental health.
So then I guess we can conclude slaughterhouses are more considerate towards their employees than Big Tech?
Probably more useful to society, too.
Oh, we'll have AI trained to do the job for them soon enough.
Maybe that's how Skynet will start.
I think it was Vice who had an interview with a Facebook community manager who attempted suicide after dealing with several accounts that had been set up to distribute CP. If not Vice, Verge? It was one of those tech e-rags.
I knew that Facebook did that kind of thing (hell apparently they outsource it to my country for dirt cheap labor), but twitter is something else... I'd go insane just from reading the all the mundane "look at my avocado toast" shit, not to mention all the horrible stuff.
Yes, and considering the real world insanity that people spreading conspiracy theories to idiots on the internet "for the lulz" is already terrible, I don't regret they didn't make things worse than they already have.
We've already got people genuinely thinking the earth is flat, the moon landings aren't real, and a child sex dungeon exists below a pizza parlor that doesn't have a fucking basement, and a plethora of of other things, all of it spurred on by dickheads on the internet who think it's funny to weaponize stupidity. Then those idiots go out and empower that stupidity by voting in ridiculous ways, giving legitimacy to horrible people and horrible laws, that cause actual harm to people, potentially for decades.
But hey, we lost out on the chance for lulz, truly a tragedy.
Those examples are relatively minor, in that they are contained to the minds of a fairly small number of people.
OTOH, the stuff about vaccines and alternative medicine and the like is widespread and gets people killed quite regularly.
We absolutely do not need more disinformation thrown into the mess all of a sudden.
It's why I said "and a plethora of other things." they were the first to come to mind in the 3 minutes I had between clients at work to cite.
To be fair I highly HIGHLY doubt Obama, Gates or any of them is doing illegal shit in their DMs. When Bill Gates wants to buy a pound of blow and some Filipino slave boys he doesn't go to Twitter. Just saying the truly criminal( not that I think Gates or Obama are criminals mind, this is just a statement) don't use social media for their crimes.
We are just lucky one of them weren't anarchists who used Trump's Twitter account to say he will nuke Russia, and or China or even North Korea. That stupid greedy twitter employee could have put the whole world at risk. As for Twitter, this is what happens when you skim on employee pay, and or security.
Funny enough when I saw this I was like Nah not a big deal, but as I think about it I get more and more horrified.
Funny enough when I saw this I was like Nah not a big deal, but as I think about it I get more and more horrified.
Guess what, each and every last one of those things you just said predate this, will continue despite it, and the people who propagate them are so far beyond reason they treat the most conclusive debunking and even silence as proof for them. People who think Bill Gates is secretly sitting on the patent and designs for water-powered cars already believed it, and are going to believe it regardless what Bill Gates or his social media managers say regardless of forum. The number of minds that would be changed based on a Twitter prank is approximately zero.
The cases of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein say otherwise. People who think they're untouchable get stupid and sloppy. Just sayin'.
Wow, just wow.
You said in your opening post, that the conspiracy theories would last decades, and now you say nobody have their minds changed by it. You can't have it both ways pal.
He said "The number of minds that would be changed based on a Twitter prank is approximately zero." You're gonna have a tough time convincing me that folks who would believe in flat-earth have minds to change.