I remember it pretty much that way too, but not recently and not at a department store. Heck, I just browsed through commemorative euro coins (no dice) because I felt it was somehow connected to Europe in the nineties…

Then I am happy for you

“Victim” is an interesting term, but quite accurate. There’s such a an effort and investment into converting people to that cult. I wish you the best with your mother, hopefully the other half of your conversations is more pleasant and eventually overtakes the conspiracy theories.

I don’t. We don’t talk. Relatives of mine, including one of my parents, sank into vaccine conspiracies, then followed that pipeline to Qanon, and then explained to me how they were waiting for Trump to lead his secret army to take down the government of my non-english-speaking, european country.

I gave them their keys back, I got my keys backs, I blocked them everywhere, I nuked my accounts on the social media they use (and where their posts steadily got worse). It’s a hard decision, I still think about it often still (it’s been nearly two years), but I will never talk to them again.

I get my hosting for free from my workplace, which is cool but doesn’t give me much leeway on what I can install. It’s a plain PHP/MySQL system. Docker is out, and a lot of stuff with it. I’d run a server from apartment if I could, since I’m sitting on piles of old hardware, but I’ve yet to figure a way around my ever-changing IP address.

Right now, I have FreshRSS and my own websites, and Rss Bridge

I’d love to run more “Old School Tools”, I just need to find them :)

Throwing phys.org into my “not necessarily reliable sources” list. Sorry about this, I’ll be more careful in the future.

I added “Misleading” to the title.

Thanks for this. I’ll freely admit I’m an idiot and didn’t feel smart enough to understand the paper (see username). Clarification is much welcome.

I added the link to the paper to the body of the post.

I think the young feel immune, and that they feel socially progressive news cannot be lies because “that is not what our side does, we have ethics”.

It’s not true in practice, though. Fake news are used to sow division, and making people angry on both sides is part of it. The far-right, boomer fake news are more obvious because they are outlandish, but there’s more than that out there.

It is, and I feel the questions are quite obvious.

That being said… I’m related to conspiracy theorists. I got a first-row seat to their dumbassery on facebook before I deleted my account. And… a significant issue was paywalled articles with clickbait titles, during Covid especially. The title was a doubt-inducing questions, such as “Do vaccines make you magnetic?” and the reasoning disproving that was locked behind the paywall. And my relatives used those as confirmation that their views were true. Because the headlines introduced doubt and the content wasn’t readable. That and satire articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

The immediate aim is to entertain, confuse, and overwhelm the audience, and disinterest in or opposition to fact-checking and accurate reporting means the propaganda can be delivered to the public more quickly than better sources.

That’s… That was true for me, I think. I’m old, didn’t always have the internet, I trusted books and family.

But I trusted books, which made me a bit of an alien in my family. And then I acquired extreme suspicion of everything when, at the same time, I started paying attention to far-right politics, and my family got sucked into far-right thinking.

Now they went full Qanon, which pretty much radicalized me. Things are so emotionally charged for me now that I have to doubt and cross-check out of sheer and absolute spite. That shit robbed me of my family and I am so, so pissed.

Honest questions: What worthwhile alternatives exist already? If there are none, what can be done? What can be built to improve discoverability of authors while moderating what is visible?

With my track record at killing even cacti, I am going to suck at this game. It does sound interesting, though (and “great story” is enough to make me face the rice farming).

It definitely sounds unique, which is exactly was I was hoping for when I made the post! Thank you!

Rounding error :)

As a terminally online millennial, I was scared for a second, but I did okay on the test. Then again, I’m 40 and barely even qualify as ‘millennial’, and not at all as ‘young’.

I found the language of the questions was glaringly obvious. What do you think?

Podcast addict is both incredibly customizable and feature rich. Absolutely worth trying.

Or it becomes mostly unmoderated, near a major election, at the same time as twitter turns into disinfo central.