Back in 2014, right-wing trolls on 4chan came up with an idea: #EndFathersDay To be clear, they didn’t actually want to “end” Father’s Day. No, no, they simply wanted to cause chaos and make feminists look bad. It was a simple plan: create a bunch of fake, feminist-looking Twitter accounts, flood the internet with tweets calling for the abolition of Father’s Day while using the hashtag #EndFathersDay, and then sitting back and waiting to see what would happen.
Well, I'm not surprised at all. Americans are becoming more stupid and gullible every day. We're living in the heyday of Q-Anon, and let's not forget that a third of the country believes that Trump is our "rightful president." A poll last winter revealed that an estimated 21 million people are willing to kill in order to "save America" from whatever threat they read about on Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Give it a few years, and the internet will be unusable because it will be overrun with wingnuts.
I've long struggled with how to convey proper sourcing to people. If we start with, for example, if someone makes a claim, you can't take it at face value. Okay. What if they have a source? How do you tell if it's a good source?
I remember once seeing someone trying to argue for the young-earth creationist apologetic that we can see stars millions of lightyears away despite a supposed 6,000 year old earth because light used to travel faster than now. And they provided a source -- an academic source! That happened to have a table of historical measured speeds of light, that did vary, because the ability to measure light has changed and become more precise over time. But it always stayed with me that evaluating that source to determine it did not support his claim took a certain level critical thinking and literacy. That and he could have just said god made the light already en-route, but I digress.
To know that the profile photo in your example is fake requires the knowledge of reverse image search being a thing, and knowing how to do it. That's teachable for this specific thing, but it's more difficult than I think a lot of people want to acknowledge to avoid falling victim to misinformation. I think we all, occasionally, get bit. I don't really have a good answer. I wish people cared more about whether their beliefs were true or not.
I haven't used Twitter since 2011 when I was in Egypt and keeping track of the protests. I used to follow some journalists and a few activists. I'm still on Facebook but use it only for a little animal rescue stuff even though at one time I had 3,000+ friends when I was a political activist. Now Facebook is a cesspool and everyone's nasty. I really hate the internet. It's being ruined by people somehow triggered by the power anonymity gives them. How sick is it to steal someone's photo and create a fake profile portraying them as a pedophile? Or claim politicians kidnap and rape babies? And the animal torture videos some people get their jollies from, don't get me started.
Well, I'm not surprised at all. Americans are becoming more stupid and gullible every day. We're living in the heyday of Q-Anon, and let's not forget that a third of the country believes that Trump is our "rightful president." A poll last winter revealed that an estimated 21 million people are willing to kill in order to "save America" from whatever threat they read about on Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Give it a few years, and the internet will be unusable because it will be overrun with wingnuts.
I've long struggled with how to convey proper sourcing to people. If we start with, for example, if someone makes a claim, you can't take it at face value. Okay. What if they have a source? How do you tell if it's a good source?
I remember once seeing someone trying to argue for the young-earth creationist apologetic that we can see stars millions of lightyears away despite a supposed 6,000 year old earth because light used to travel faster than now. And they provided a source -- an academic source! That happened to have a table of historical measured speeds of light, that did vary, because the ability to measure light has changed and become more precise over time. But it always stayed with me that evaluating that source to determine it did not support his claim took a certain level critical thinking and literacy. That and he could have just said god made the light already en-route, but I digress.
To know that the profile photo in your example is fake requires the knowledge of reverse image search being a thing, and knowing how to do it. That's teachable for this specific thing, but it's more difficult than I think a lot of people want to acknowledge to avoid falling victim to misinformation. I think we all, occasionally, get bit. I don't really have a good answer. I wish people cared more about whether their beliefs were true or not.
There’s also the @Abolish2AMom user name thrown in just for good measure!
Obviously, we should do our due diligence as end users, but is Twitter doing anything about these fake accounts/can they reasonably do anything?
I haven't used Twitter since 2011 when I was in Egypt and keeping track of the protests. I used to follow some journalists and a few activists. I'm still on Facebook but use it only for a little animal rescue stuff even though at one time I had 3,000+ friends when I was a political activist. Now Facebook is a cesspool and everyone's nasty. I really hate the internet. It's being ruined by people somehow triggered by the power anonymity gives them. How sick is it to steal someone's photo and create a fake profile portraying them as a pedophile? Or claim politicians kidnap and rape babies? And the animal torture videos some people get their jollies from, don't get me started.