The Online: Increasingly Real or Unreal?

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wild greens said:
Making the endless posts on sub-niche one subject obsessive accounts like those are probably the most online you can get in a way, right. Developing a thought pattern over a series of posts to fit a small sensibility that only works in two or three online-only mediums, to the tiny audience that gets it. Kardashians are obviously massively famous so i guess this one has a lot more crossover and is more "successful" i guess but equal effort goes to such tiny narrow burrows.

Quite admire it in a way
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The 'stan' accounts that escalate to dogpiling anyone who goes against their chosen celebrity are alarming. Hordes of bots/people telling someone to kill themselves or just hurling insults because they dared to criticise Taylor Swift or some K-pop act.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
The 'stan' accounts that escalate to dogpiling anyone who goes against their chosen celebrity are alarming. Hordes of bots/people telling someone to kill themselves or just hurling insults because they dared to criticise Taylor Swift or some K-pop act.
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If you think those are bad, wait till you see these 'gus' accounts!
 
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Guess we can consider the Trump campaign another point in favour of 'increasingly real' given the whole Rogan/podcast component among younger voters.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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It's a supply and demand thing: if partisan media shies away from treating a person or topic properly online steps in and people seeking supply may then stay there.
 
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Maybe someone who's on the apps or socialises more than I do can weigh in, but the other day I was struck by how lopsided a lot of the 'gender war' stuff is in the sense that the people complaining about men online tend to complain about things men do irl whereas a lot of the people complaining about women online tend to be reacting to tweets, memes, TikToks, etc. which they can just turn off or ignore.

That whole 'man vs. bear' thing from a while back seems like a perfect convergence of the two currents. One group being angry about something and creating a meme and the other group being angry about the meme.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
william kent said:
Maybe someone who's on the apps or socialises more than I do can weigh in, but the other day I was struck by how lopsided a lot of the 'gender war' stuff is in the sense that the people complaining about men online tend to complain about things men do irl whereas a lot of the people complaining about women online tend to be reacting to tweets, memes, TikToks, etc. which they can just turn off or ignore.

That whole 'man vs. bear' thing from a while back seems like a perfect convergence of the two currents. One group being angry about something and creating a meme and the other group being angry about the meme.
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= Men worry that women might laugh at them, women worry that men will kill them
 
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sufi said:
= Men worry that women might laugh at them, women worry that men will kill them
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I think the biggest fear for men is being falsely accused of some form of abuse or that a woman turns out to be a nutter/stalker, but even then those things don't seem anywhere near as common as the things women are talking about dealing with on a more or less daily basis.
 
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0bleak

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All I know if that it has been really nice to read a constant, steady stream of negative shit about your gender when practically everything people accuse men of doing has been done to me (physical assault, threat of physical assault, being groped, overt and lewd sexual advances in public and/or the workplace, being stalked by women you don't even know), besides being intentionally put in situations where they are provoking another guy is to fight you, etc.
but, ah, it's no concern because I have the "power and privilege"
 
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A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into a popular debate subreddit called r/changemyview in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people’s minds about contentious topics.​
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The bots made more than a thousand comments over the course of several months and at times pretended to be a “rape victim,” a “Black man” who was opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, someone who “works at a domestic violence shelter,” and a bot who suggested that specific types of criminals should not be rehabilitated. Some of the bots in question “personalized” their comments by researching the person who had started the discussion and tailoring their answers to them by guessing the person’s “gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation as inferred from their posting history using another LLM.”​

www.404media.co

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users

The researchers' bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.
www.404media.co www.404media.co

Does this sort of thing alter anyone's view somewhat re: the initial question? What happems when the internet itself becomes increasingly unreal in content whilst becoming increasingly real due to its reach into daily life? If people start repeating things they've wittingly or unwittingly picked up from bots online, does that further complicate the situation?
 
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wg- said:
On a similar note:



It's pretty obvious to me but each to their own
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The thing that's always in the back of my mind is whether what you're reading about bots or some fake story is itself generated by bots. Once the idea's seeded then it doesn't even need to be the case to exert an influence, like when lots of people became paranoid about 'Russian bots' and suddenly decided anyone they were arguing about politics with on Reddit was one.
 
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