Is social media destroying the West?

We managed it for 200 years up to that point. If you want this Republic to manage a record less then half of Rome's, I suggest we start figuring out a way to revert the process.

>article begins by referencing eron gjoni's "Zoe post" , saying that it implies and thus is centred around alleging Zoe quinn fucked a journalist for positive scores

Stopped reading right there. For old media seeking to address fake news, the least the author could've done was do a little fucking research and realise the Zoe post was a call out post in the same vein of social justice about the gaslighting and emotional abuse suffered by gjoni. Gjoni didn't even dwell on the people she fucked, just that it was in the midst of her abusive treatment of him. It merely caught public attention because people on reddit and /v/ extrapolated from it the sex for scores interpretation

God this pisses me off so much and shit like this is why I don't trust mainstream news. The moment they started reported on internet shit close enough to me to be tangible was the moment I realised "if they are so wrong about this, what's to say they are correct about everything else that I don't have a personal comprehension and involvement with?"

>they're still caught up on Gamergate

Contemptible.

Is my dick destroying ur mums pussay?!
Lol.

>destroying the antidemocratic consensus in the West.
Fixed that for you.

If people are becoming more radicalized, which I doubt but I am too hungry to go check the data they built those pretty charts on, it is a good thing for democracy, as it widens the spectre of political options available.
People in the past were not better informed or more able to think critically and determine what they want from/for society and how to get it. This did not get worse, but instead of being misinformed into all supporting the interests of one small section of society they now are misinformed into following divergent movements.
That will allow people to have more political agency, which is the basis of real democracy.
Consensus that is not entered by well informed choice, on the other hand, is just totalitarism by default.

Some people legit have politics as an interest and nothing more, entertainment in the same way watching soccer is.

tl;dr internet is making people whacky noo noo

The economist is a newspaper not a magazine
T. Used to work in TE tower and got told off when ever I referenced it as a magazine

The trend toward mental illness started long before the invention of the internet.

>Several recent, large epidemiologic and family studies suggest important temporal changes in the rates of major depression: an increase in the rates in the cohorts born after World War II; a decrease in the age of onset with an increase in the late teenaged and early adult years; an increase between 1960 and 1975 in the rates of depression for all ages; a persistent gender effect, with the risk of depression consistently two to three times higher among women than men across all adult ages; a persistent family effect, with the risk about two to three times higher in first-degree relatives as compared with controls; and the suggestion of a narrowing of the differential risk to men and women due to a greater increase in risk of depression among young men. These trends, drawn from studies using comparable methods and modern diagnostic criteria, are evident in the United States, Sweden, Germany, Canada, and New Zealand.

Report from 1988.

First, a general rise in psychopathology could contribute to this phenomenon because psychiatric disorders have high co-morbidity. Drug and alcohol abuse are often found in conjunction with depression (Regier et al., 1990). Estimates of lifetime prevalence of substance use disorders in the US range from 10.3% to 26.6% (Compton et al., 2007; Kessler et al., 1994) with an increased lifetime risk in younger cohorts (Kessler et al., 2005). Anxiety disorders are the most common class of mental disorders (Kessler et al., 2007; Kessler et al., 2005) and are highly co-morbid with mood disorders (Kaufman and Charney, 2000). Anxiety in children and college students has increased almost one standard deviation from the 1950’s to the 1990’s (Twenge, 2000) with a cohort effect for increased lifetime risk in most countries surveyed (Kessler et al., 2007).

2012 review

It is the borderline society, my friend. We can merely hold on now.

>the alternatives are literal white supremacism and dude free stuff

No thanks

>Heavens to Betsy, White people in charge of their own motherland!

Destroying may not be the word here but I can definitely see a negative influence, the main problem is that social media is used for social masturbation90% of the time and political (wow I'm so popular, look at what I do and what I eat, don't you see my life is interesting?????) And
grants peoples an overinflated ego, everyone thinks they are experts on thing they don't know anything about. That shit gets on my nerves like nothing else because of how obscene it is sometimes, I just went to the British Museum and peoples spend more time taking photos and fucking selfies than actually looking at things.

It also bothers me a lit that an entire plan of modern social life is owned and controlled by private companies (or anybody really), that mass of data I think will reveal or has already revealed some glitches in human psyche that will further the ability of governments to keep the masses at bay, not that I believe in any conspiracy tho.

hmmm

Proof for point 3?
And btw any western country with a women in charge of secret services is going the same path

...

...

Looking at those charts in the op, it's pretty interesting that Republicans are more spread out than Democrats.

Please explain to a europoor what's happening there. Is liberal bias in the media making Democrats more sure of themselves? Are the Republicans actually as much of a disorganised clusterfuck as Trump made them look?

>The Economist
dropped

>the economist
>politicized article thinly veiled as apolitical and informative
Especially love when Russia (along with China and Turkey) are being brought up but the EU and US doing it is apparently not worth a mention.

Funnily enough the local US embassy directly funds bullshit here and they're not even hiding it (or hiding it in plain sight).

They're ignoring the role immigration plays. Post-1965 immigrants are overwhelmingly left-wing, which has allowed the democratic party to move far to the left of what it once was.

So America belongs to Amerindians the same as europe belongs to europeans?

Russia, China, Turkey are independent and based countries.

It is the atlanticist hegemony that needs to end.

>give clay

No. Enjoy the alcoholism.

Death to the Great Satan.

>Post-1965 immigrants are overwhelmingly left-wing,
Tough shit. Once you spend every atom of a second scapegoating and fear mongering a certain group, you shouldn't be surprised that group would treat you like the plague.

Social media will come full circle in a few years when people dont use it because it's cool not to use it again and everyone just become sick of barbie/kardashain selfie #35348 or meme rapper #283837 or porn video #9238837

This has already happened to some people ahead of the masses, I for one stopped using social media around 7 years ago. I also stopped watching porn because it's just boring now.

The internet as a whole is getting more boring. It has gone though everything from extreme porn to extreme snuff with nothing left to cover.

Soon people will reject it altogether, unless virtual reality is truly amazing

silk slippers

>cuck nu males think that starter pack is supposed to be insulting
>it's actually really cool

Really makes one think..

What is that demographic map supposed to be?

Have you been living under a fucking rock? They don't even hide it.

News agencies Russia Today and Sputnik International, Olgino troll factory and hackers from APT28 are all officially or unofficially associated with Russian government structures and used as part of organized active measures campaign to influence global public opinion on politically sensitive matters whenever Russian point of view conflicts with the Western one.

Classified briefings in the summer of 2016 from the CIA indicate that Russia attempted to sway the vote in favor of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/russia-is-already-winning-214648
economist.com/news/europe/21711538-1930s-moscow-beacon-international-movement-russian-propaganda

>He believes in /v/ conspiracy theories

Fuck out of here

>Is social media destroying the West?
No. The printing press, telegraph, radio, television etc. do not act on their own because they are inanimate tools. Media manipulation is not new, slander campaigns are not new, lying is not new. What is happening is liberals are spooked by the realisation that capitalism can thrive without liberalism.

>cuck calls other people cucks to make himself feel like less of a cuck

topkek
You're such a butthurt faggot that I can't even fathom the depths of your faggotry. You're at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, sucking cock for bus fare and walking home.

Hello Ivan.

It's nice to see you are doing well.

>Governments like Russia, China or Turkey

fucking dropped

>USA DINDU NUFFIN WRONG WE DA GOOD GUYS

Reddit style of writing and 'insults'
This isn't a family guy episode
Back you go

These are all Chinese or Russian hacks trying to divide America. For all we know even left-wing movements, such as black lives matter, are being controlled by outside influences. Point being, they don't support either the alt-right or the left. Only whichever side benefits them.

so?

thats how international politics works and always has

if a population of one country hates its government then foreign nations support the population, or not, depending on its position.

e.g. imperial countries supporting the whites in the civl war, germany supporting the fascists in spain

True... Calexit is backed by Russia, the guy who organizes it even lives in Russia under their payroll ffs.

Same as Catalan independence.

The fact that it happens in other places does not mean it's ok. America should unify and should solidify alliances with the west so we can put all of these savage countries in their place (China, Russia, Turkey, and many other filthy savages).

>it's not tinfoil if it's the DNC's agenda

I've been following Russian active measures since 2003, way before it became mainstream to talk about it.

Gerhard Schröder (German leader before Merkel) built a huge pipeline for Russia to supply gas, it was contested by the opposition back then because it reinforced Germany's dependency on Russia as the single largest source of energy. Guess what? When Schröder retired he was offered a comfy position as CEO of Gazprom's German branch.

Russian attempts to subvert Western democracy are not new, these has been going for at least 15 years for those of us who have been paying attention.

* Rosneft not Gazprom, point stands though

>What is happening is liberals are spooked by the realisation that capitalism can thrive without liberalism.
This.

This kind of shit why EU was always doomed, the french and germans hold all the power but they're Russia's biggest friends in Europe.

would russia support a decent 30s tier nazi power then if one came about today?

debt is destroying the West.

the social service schemes and economies of the west require a constant load of debt to keep going. the only way to keep the debt ball doing is to keep growing. the easiest way to grow is to grow the population of tax payers and consumers. which comes into a problem with the natural development of a post industrial country. as these places should look like Japan. where they have way below replacement birth rates, aging population, and shrinking population. So Europe and North America keeps the population growing by immigration. Immigration from outside the West. Places such as Mexico and Central America, the middle east, and africa. This "replacement population" is then bribed to vote certain ways by promises of more welfare and more immigration.

Well in 2004 there were still people who remembered the pre-media consolidation world but now after years of the same dumbed down rhetoric being crammed down our throats everyone thinks this is just the way things are supposed to be in a similar manner maybe to what is often alleged to have occurred in communist countries like Cuba and North Korea. At the same time people are tuning out of MSM like never before so the coherence that was attained by both sides of the same coin has now collapsed.

>group theory
And what symmetry are we using? SU(2)?

As long as it destroys USA idgaf.

I'm rather curious as to how they're defining liberal and conservative here

The greatest irony is that the alt-right, while claiming to be a defender of muh western civilization is actually used by foreign powers to divide the west.

>anything that isn't crony capitalism putting the (((1%))) above everyone else is a foreign ideology

Are you retarded? Where did I defend capitalism?

>le haxers did it

(((western civilization)))

Seem's plausible, though I'm not sure there is any intent behind it. I think it's entirely possible that everything you described is happening and being perpetuated by actors who are doing it for entirely different reasons than the ones described.

I'm pretty confident that this is something that could have happened accidentally, without any sort of plan or direct foresight instigating it.

Looks like someone drank the kool-aid. The point of foreign interference is to enhance polarization, not make one group a pariah. Russian interference targeted the alt-right, BLM, any sub-group for the purpose of riling up all the bases and having people vote in a reactionary way. You see this with the Bernouts voting for Sanders even though Hillary was much more progressive and realistic in her scope and how younger dems want to tear down the establishment and DNC. The psyops go much deeper than you know.

This.

People are losing their homes, their businesses, and their lifestyles while a larger and larger chunk of the country’s wealth is being funneled into the offshore bank accounts of people who would rather use it to fund their political agendas

Written journalism has been making a comeback at the expense of cable news. WSJ, WaPo, and NYT are having their best subscription numbers since 2000.

If women and minorities stopped demanding special privileges for themselves the altright would evaporate overnight and you'd thwart their evil plans.

You say that like we didn't worship mindless consumerism before, if anything I would say that such consumerism was even more rampant in the 90's, though that's anecdotal based on my own experience.

That's what i was saying you dipshit

lmao, special privileges like not being shot by the police while unarmed.

Yes, social media does make it more difficult to create consensus in that it breaks the monopoly held by traditional media owned by monied individuals. However, people would not be lurching to the side if their lives were good and they were not disgruntled with the center to be begin. People simply do not trust politicians to serve anyone but the wealthy. And the wealthy? Internationalism is simply a cover for them to care as little for their countrymen as those outside and the sheer mobility of capital gives little reason to even incidentally care about the health of the nation. If they accidentally drive the country into shit, they can just to move and take their money with them. Youth unemployment is high which is particularly bad as the young tend to be more radical and it's wealth that causes them to would otherwise cause them moderate over time. It does not help either that immigrant labor means having to settle for less for when you do get a job in order to be competitive. With all that in mind, people are going to pull the lever for anyone looking to destroy that status quo.

>It is scary as fuck that what was supposed to be a tool for absolute freedom of information is being subverted into a tool to subvert democracy
Read up on Bernays and Lippmann. In the early 20th century, people were saying that a smoothly running democracy required an elite that utilized their control of media to guide consensus. If anything, the faltering of this oligarchical element is what is causing instability.

happens to like 0.00001% of the population, logically the risk of car accidents, cancer and heart disease should be of more concern to you

The difference is that police are supposed to "protect and serve" not gun you down at the drop of a hat.

This is more comparable to Oncologists or Heart Surgeons purposely killing their patients, and if they did that based on race, there would be a shitstorm about it as well.

>much more progressive
Right, because that’s why Clinton came out in support of single payer, re-regulating Wall Street, and reigning in the military-industrial complex.

Oh wait, she didn’t do any of those things and ran as a moderate republican chickenhawk whose “most progressive platform evar!” Was a bunch of gibs and social wars bs which nobody really trusted her to follow through on.

You were implying only the alt-right is being propped up by foreign powers

>Leave the black people to me

I was not. I did not say or imply that other organizations, such as BLM are not supported by foreign powers.

> Right, because that’s why Clinton came out in support of single payer, re-regulating Wall Street, and reigning in the military-industrial complex.

This is the problem with "progressives" is that they don't want "progress" they want perfection.

Clinton favored public option because the public option version of Obamacare failed, so single payer is even less likely to pass. Progressives would rather have no healthcare bill than the perfect single payer on they want.

>Clinton favored public option because the public option version of Obamacare failed, so single payer is even less likely to pass. Progressives would rather have no healthcare bill than the perfect single payer on they want.

Obamacare is actually Romneycare, a muddled compromise between market and single-payer that lots of people rightly hate.

There's also the European Union trying to consolidate it's power. More and more are member states required to delegate power to Brussels, and national legislation has to be compatible with European law.
I think the European Union is trying to become a union that can match possible future super powers like China and India, and the way they do it is by creating a larger population, by means of immigration. Immigration undermines national identity and creates a division, and that makes it easier for the member states to become part of a single union.

USA is the problem, Jimbo.

So u be sayin' Mongrelica should control Europe and destroy conservative homogeneous countries in the East?

>economist.com/news/briefing/21730870-economy-based-attention-easily-gamed-once-considered-boon-democracy-social-media
who wrote this article?
Doesn't say who the author is

I know bad shit has been happening, cia losing the vírus they made that are now all over the internet
Also know social mídia, Facebook, Twitter.. is completly mined
Know about govs and wealthy people paying think thanks and ONG's to undermine the growth of the right...
Heard about the russian and chinese shills but wanted to know more before making an opinion

>spending billions

Well shit, if that's the case then we can verify that Russia is terrible at budgeting.

Here, you want some proof to the contrary look at this investigation that was made with a direct interest in finding as much as possible and painting as much activity as possible as malevolent.

You'll notice that their findings show that even with the broadest interpretations as to what constitutes intervention that the numbers are completley insignificant small compared to "legitimate" national and international stuff. And you'll find that a lot of the traffic from Russia actually was in support of the Clinton candidacy as well as the Trump candidacy, suggesting that it's not a singular effort by the Russian government but more of an effort by individuals with some of them perhaps having backing of the Russian government.
judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/10-31-17 Edgett Testimony.pdf

Seriously though, they might spend SOME money on it, but unless these efforts are the worlds biggest money laundering schemes then saying they spent "billions" is completley off base and hyperbolic. The problem is exceptionally small in scale regardless of how serious it may be.

I personally don't think it's a big deal, but that's another conversation for another time methinks.

>getting this assblasted over an empirically true point that's actually on-topic
literally what is wrong with you?

0.74% out of billions of tweets is a lot.
And it has a multiplier effect when you add up the "fake news" websites (there were hundreds of them en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites), the non-bot paid shills, and the people duped by them retweeting their stuff.

They do have those pussy riot freaks and other people in their society with their issues that are intrested in the most important elections of the world, only natural
About money i will never care unless if it was directly deposited by russian gov or any of their institutions, after all Hillary had saudi money, and soros and Rockefeller also have they money (((invested)))

I know right? We should have only state run media and government approved newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. And if someone brings up any alternative views they should be arrested for spreading Russian propaganda because our government is benevolent and the U.S. is by definition good and benevolent by nature. We should also start censoring social media posts that sound like Russian propaganda. Maybe the internet should be censored as well.

>0.74% out of billions of tweets is a lot
First off, it's millions not billions. Don't try to blow the numbers out of proportion, because it's important. And secondly, yea, bots do that, but even then it's an insignificant amount of what people actually see.

That's why I specifically linked the bit about impressions. See that line "0.33% of impressions are on Tweets from Russian-linked automated accounts" that means that you would have been dwarfed by organic content. That is to say that you would probably have to look through a few hundred re-tweets to see something that was re-tweeted from one of these bots and that their likes and such would have been very small in comparison to stuff from normal people. To the point where their impact is pretty much negligible.

That's not even to mention the fact that there was also activity from these accounts in support of Hillary, maybe a minority of it was in support of her but you would have to be pretty biased to discount it completley.

The same sort of pattern is perpetuated across every major platform. The reason I talk about Twitter specifically is because it's actually most endemic on Twitter specifically. If you look Facebook it goes down from 0.74% to something like 0.004% or something like that.

And as for the paid shills and third party sites, again, it was a very small minority of the conversation, to the point where it was negligible, and it was on both sides, not just for Trump. Hell, there's actually more direct evidence available regarding paid for shilling on behalf of Hillary's own campaign, stuff she herself spent money on for her bid, than there is for all this third party stuff that's being flaunted like it's the end of the fucking world.

So yea, it's a thing, that we should probably be concerned about. Though it warrants about the same level of concern as "should I mow the lawn today before it rains?" does. Stop fixating on it, stop obsessing over it, it's a "nothing burger"

Works both ways tough

remember shareblue, etc
>I'm not a robot

>Governments like Russia, China or Turkey are actively taking advantage of these flaws, spending billions to hire armies of trolls and agents of influence to subvert democracy to their ends, spreading fake news, conspiracy theories, bot twitter campaigns and so on.
>Muh Russia hacked the election conspiritard theory
Not interesting at all desu, the economist is tinfoil hat as shit

Immigrant and black communities have strong socialy conservative tendencies conservatives could take advantage of if they werent so caught up on indercutting their political ascension.

B-b-but interacting with muh former communist boogeyman at all on social media means Drumpf stole the election

Yea, it's a thing, and it was on both sides to a certain extent, but it's fucking pointless to talk about in any serious context because it left such a small impression on the race because it was a tiny minority of the conversation that most people just straight up ignored.

To say it in Veeky Forums terms, it was just shitposting. There's never a point in talking about the shitposter, or telling the shitposter to stop shitposting. It's far better to simply ignore them and only acknowledge their presence to call someone retarded for responding to the shitposter or taking them seriously.