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Black Medal of Honor recipient removed from US Department of Defense website
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Yes, and I was one of that generation who believed broad adoption of the Internet would cut out the gatekeepers and lead to a better-informed electorate that would give more radical ideas a shot. And I guess it did, but the problem is that it's primarily allowed the worst of bad actors direct, unfiltered access to a vast swathe of the most credulous, easily-manipulated idiots in the world. Arguably it's massively tilted the field towards authoritarianism because before the Internet, left-wing activists were better-educated, and more capable of organizing and communicating. Now, though, it takes no special knowledge or effort for a right-wing conspiracy theorist or authoritarian demagogue to jump on X or Facebook or whatever other platform you like and immediately blast their message out to vast numbers of their followers -- who are largely passive consumers of this stuff, waiting to given their party line and marching orders. Before the Internet, they had mostly-mainstream ideas because that was what the filter of the mainstream media gave them. Now they're getting sucked into the far right because social media is biased for shareable outrage-bait propaganda and against validated facts and nuanced discussion.
you're acting like the problem here is the nature of not just the internet, but any hypothetical internet, but you give the game away right in your comment:
big monopolized platforms controlled by megacorps that use algorithmic curation to decide what the products/hogs/rubes see. use a new computer-it can be a VM; I won't tell. use it from a new connection-VPN is fine. create a fresh youtube account. search for a video of a random thing you don't think is super politically polarized. space exploration, typography, taylor swift.
now click on the first recommendation. keep doing that. count how long it takes to start showing you literal nazi shit. if you need a bright line for that, maybe keep an eye out for the phrases "BLOOD AND SOIL" or "FUTURE FOR WHITE CHILDREN".
see, the problem here is, it did actually work how you thought. briefly. it wasn't clean or perfect. we got to see a lot of distended assholes in the process. some people ended up going down some crazy fucked up rabbit holes. pro-ana groups did not start on facebook. but this shit was, provably, not structural.
but, generally, the internet was moving things left. that had to be stopped. had to be butchered and dominated by a corporation. it was just a little less obvious what was happening at the time than when they did it for united fruit, with a smaller immediate body count.
I'd argue the internet was moving things left, while the bar for entry was at least nominal. When the bar for sharing your ideas was at least as high as "learn to code HTML and find a place to put your site up" the Time Cube cranks were few and far between, and most people participating on the web could be assumed to have some modicum of intelligence. However, the defining factor of the Internet as it stands, dominated by social media platforms, is that it's frictionless by design. And yes, the platforms are pushing right-wing content, but to a certain extent that's accidental, or at least was when engagement algorithms first became a part of the experience. Left wing content, reality-based as it tends to be, is generally full of nuance, equivocation, and explanation that takes time and (critically) doesn't reach down into the basal structures of the brain and squeeze the amygdala quite like a right-wing fearmonger shouting "TRANS PEOPLE ARE SNEAKING INTO YOUR DAUGHTER'S SCHOOL RESTROOM TO ASSAULT HER BE AFRAID!"
Could social media be designed to put the brakes on reactionary content and boost thoughtful, well-researched opinions? Yeah, probably. But that requires expensive and time-consuming human intervention in the form of fact-checking, and doesn't boost engagement like content that just pushes all the fight-or-flight buttons way down in the lizard brain. Making the Internet easy and frictionless only turbocharged Terry Pratchett's idea that "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on," because technology makes the lie spread faster than ever, but the process of getting to the truth never got easier at quite the same rate.
I just wasted my time going into a spiel about this very same thing on YouTube. Comment was immediately removed.