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view the rest of the comments
You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.
What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn't denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless "unmask our kids" groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.
A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a "Democratic" candidate ๐คฆโโ) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn't that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.
It was around the 2016 election that things started to change. Before that, there was still a mentality of open and genuine discourse in most subs. But after the election that started to die, people started realizing bots and alt-righters had no interest in open discourse, on the contrary they would see to abuse such channels as a platform for their hate, and would use such hate and anger in an attempt to shape and suppress discussions. This forced the community to become far more jaded and less open, realizing just how vulnerable the community was to radicalization and firehouse misinformation.
On the early internet, we all had this vision that free access to information would free everyone, that unlimited information could only do good. Most of those people now understand how nieve we were, unlimited information means unlimited disinformation, and that organizations would always see to weaponize information the way they weaponize everything else. We are in a different internet age, now.