foreign grifters
I think its far more likely for GOP/MAGA to be buying twitter “engagement” on Fiver, than grifters “launching influencer careers” by directing MAGA fans to their other socials? or spamming affiliate purchase links on twitter?
A key question/reality check is that instead of treating MAGA fanaticism as foreign agent propaganda, it is GOP propaganda outsourced to cheapest providers.
There is a lot of foreign support for Trump among foreigners and immigrants (prior to elections anyway). What they all have in common is a hatred for the US, and a deep thirst for trans/woke outrage click bait. While it doesn’t affect foreigners in any good way, “at least he’s doing a great job on the mexican rapist invaders” is only point of approval support remaining. Really, where Trump fanaticism was resurected was purely on anger towards a trans inclusive world order. Every other policy is just brainwashing people who come for the anti-trans circlejerk, but stay for the tax cuts for oligarch climate terrorists.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I’ve seen a flood of “I’m a Palestinian who is struggling to survive, please send me money” posts and PMs on BlueSky and Instagram and other liberal-leaning social media. Folks love to believe their team is the “smarties” and the opposition is the “dummies”. Nobody likes to believe they’d be ripe for exploitation.
Consequently, your refusal to believe in your own gullibility and bias opens you up to scammers.
Like everything else capitalist, it starts out as an independent venture and congeals into national industry as the rate of return grows. The modern era of internet scamming is just the latest in a long history of affinity scams and MLM schemes. People are drawn in out of fear, confusion, and desperation. And because the better scammers know to tip their political overclass, these scam factories tend to be insulated from any kind of regulation or public prosecution.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
People who have a higher level of Education and have to think for a living are less prone to fall for pure lies + strong displays of emotion and instead tend to fall for context/information-control scams + pushing of subconscious buttons, and as it so happens the Republicans tend to use more the former kind of scam whilst the Democrats the latter (none of which “my” “team” as I’m not even American).
As it so happens, outright lies and emotional raging are far more accessible for foreign scammers than the more subtle kinds of manipulation (which are more common in the Press: for example how in most of the Press in the Israeli Gaza Genocide, Israelis are “killed” whilst Palestinians merely “die”).
I totally agree with the rest of your post. Widespread scamming is a natural thing in Capitalism.
The whole emergent property element is how, due to in the modern age external scammers that aren’t even directly involved in US politics and thus don’t gain from side A or side B being able to still make money from view alone, as a group they have had a systemic impact in the use politics - those individual actions of individuals who aren’t actually organized (as they’re not even in those political parties) combined to do (or at least accelerate) a systemic change in the politics of the US.
Maybe (probably?) scams around politics in Capitalism also do combine in an emergent way from bottom up to shape each nations’ politics as a whole, but this is the first time a large fraction of the actors in that don’t directly gain from being in politics or receiving political patronage, and instead merely gain from using rage to get attention (more specifically, clicks), and I believe that has caused something else to emerge from it at a systemic level than what there was before since these people care even less about the possible destruction that their actions might cause since they themselves will never suffer from it.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
That’s simply not true. Education does not negate emotion. Nor does it negate the consequences of old age or the erosive effect of decades of propaganda. Hell, “education” in the abstract isn’t even well-defined. You get a degree from Liberty University and you’re not going to come out more Woke than some kid with a GED busting ass in the dockworker’s union or organizing Starbucks and Walmart workers.
Definitely not good to see people farther and farther removed from the ramifications of their actions. That said, this is right in line with the 19th century quackery and fly-by-night scams that plagued the laisse-faire economy of the era.
I wouldn’t say its creating a new ideology so much as resurrecting an old one.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 minutes ago
I grew up in a country which is weird: it’s a mix of people from the old generation who mainly have basic education and then the next generation over has a high proportion of University educated (this, by the way, applies to my extended family).
The latter simply have a higher tendency for thinking before reacting (even though they’re older) which is much rarer in the former. Doesn’t mean the latter don’t have emotion, it means they’re less prone to unthinkingly react on emotion alone.
I’ve also seen a similar effect in other countries I lived in.
In my experience and as you say, Education doesn’t negate emotion, what it does is make people more prone to first think (which might mean they stop themselves) rather than immediatelly react on emotion alone.
In addition to that it also gives people a larger based of information to, when they think, judge things in a more informed way.
So, repeating myself, the more highly Educated are not immune to being scammed, they’re just more resilent to simpler scams because there’s they have a higher tendency to think rather than just blindly react. If you want to scam people who tend to think and have a broader base of information, you have to be more subtle (hence, as I pointed out, using techniques like a lot of the “progressive” Press like The Guardian or the New York Times uses in their Gaza coverage such as subtly portraying Israel and Israelis as more important and trustworthy - they “are killed” and their authorities “say” - and Palestinians as less so - they “die” and their authorities “claim” - the kind of subtle manipulation anchored on modern psychology technique which you don’t see in less highbrow media.
By the way, life experience (emphasys on “experience” - merelly being old doesn’t count) confers the same effect of tending to stop and think before plunging into things.
That said, I’ve seen plenty of highly educated people react in stupid ways driven by emotion, it’s just less likely.