Of course, this is also something any artist who creates and performs art for an audience understands that as much as expression can be about vulnerability it can also be about lying, twisting the truth and getting people to agree to terrible things because ythe way you deliver it is charismatic or distracts sufficiently from the material reality.

I am really not interested in reading endless technica diagnosis of all the different species and taxonomies of manipulation that occur and could occur in public online conversations. It is great that people want to do that but I am an artist, I don’t need this explained to me in suffocating jargon, it is an immediate intuitive reality to an artist who is being honest with themselves.

All of this to say, yes, manipulation is still rampant, but we are talking in an a semi-abstracted space, manipulation will always be possible it is simply a question of how obvious it is to authentic users and/or how costly it is to create sufficiently convincing astroturfing bots and consensus.

Your response doesn’t invalidate my point, my point is that public conversation where people explain their arguments and give sources and people can respond and critique each other with no centralized authority necessarily determining the existential ability of users to participate in the conversation (i.e. you get banned from reddit for mentioning luigi) is the best solution we have. This is the fundamentally difficult problem of social media, all the programming, scaling up of server architecture, design of protocols, UIs and coding of clients, apps etc… that is the easy stuff honestly.