This thread—on YouTube garbage rotting brains—breaks my fucking heart. https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1282483254357098496

I watched this happen to my aunt. Within a couple of years of getting on Facebook, she was constantly posting racist memes and trying to convince me that my Arab partner at the time was a secret terrorist.

My father started to go down the Fox rabbithole not long before he passed away. I admit that I'm glad he missed the Trump era, because I don't know where he would've landed.

Someone in that thread commented that Boomers are particularly susceptible to this because they've spent their whole lives watching a Voice of Authority on TV spew American interest at them, and I don't really disagree. Not like TV was factful before.

Side note: I met a filmmaker not long ago who "explored" a story about vaccines and opposition to them because of bad side effects and all I could think was "how fucking irresponsible of you."

And that sucks, because it was a real story and my censorial reaction was not great, but that's the world we're living in: Certain forms of speech have put our entire world at risk, and I don't know what to do about it.

And I worry, a lot, that our general reluctance to view algorithmically-pushed online one-to-many speech issues as a phenomenon apart from traditional offline speech issues is a mistake.