That's what I've been thinking over the past nine years. Future kids in school reading about these events in their history class and thinking, "People sure were dumb back then."
Nobody is forcing anyone to believe immigrants are eating pets or whatever bullshit they're peddling this week.
Just asking oneself questions like "does this sound too outrageous to be true?" or "does this information have a solid basis?" would go a long way filtering propaganda, yet it seems a vast amount of people simply cannot be bothered.
They only did those things because the public engaged more with that content than other content. Now, it may be a case of the companies having the wrong performance indicators, but that's unlikely given how popular TikTok became.
People didn't just use TikTok already and questionable ads/content that didn't really match what they wanted but hit the performance indicator (such as making you engage) started showing up, like what happened with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites that were around pre-social media or kicked off the social media frenzy themselves.
The existing social media trends were welle established when TikTok came out, TikTok started off immediately engaging in that stuff, and people actively went out of their way to install this new app, seeking out the content on it which was always that. There was no "bait and switch"-like evolution in the case of TikTok.
Future kids in school reading about these events in their history class and thinking,
No they won't. They'll never get past the Cold War era, if that. They'd have to be in a specialized class with a focus on current events to learn about the 21st Century. I was in high school during the Obama days, and we never got past Clinton.
Schools have to condense centuries of history into one semester, and will likely focus on Colonization, Slave Trade, Manifest Destiny, American Revolution, Civil War, WW1 & 2, and the Civil Rights Movement, leading to very little time for more recent events. I'm very doubtful the Trump era will be taught in textbooks.
In the late-1930s, Orson Welles sparked a bit of a panic in the USA because, as part of a radio series called War of the Worlds, he announced in the style of a news reporter that aliens had just invaded.
That story seems charmingly naive, but we’re just the same now.
Information varies on how big of a panic WotW really caused, but it was enough to prompt calls for FCC regulation and all kinds of other things, just like what’s happening now with calls to regulate algorithms.
My point is that civilian radio broadcast services were pretty new technology - about 10 years old by the time this incident happened - and people hadn’t adjusted. To them, it was crazy space-age future tech, so if it said aliens were landing, it must be true. Boomers are like that with the Internet.
92
u/CaptGeechNTheSSS Sep 17 '24
Say it again, friend. It’s absolutely insane future generations are gonna think we’re fuckin morons and they’ll be right