looks a lot worse if you compare it to 2019, and account for the fact “other” has a lot of far right parties such as the “SS aren’t war criminals” AFD.
Can you share some AfD policies for those who haven't been following as closely? I know they're anti-immigration, but that's broad and vague.
Anti-Islam, Anti-EU, Remove Welfare, Mass deportations (even for people with german passports it they haven’t “integrated” — code word for being white, straight, and able-bodied) Russian apologists, “Völkish Nationalism”, — you get the picture
Ever wonder why mainstream social media feeds were filled with right wing content, and far right comments? Or why left-wing communities get hijacked by people saying you should not vote, or only vote for super far left pro-russia parties.
Behold the “Russian Web Brigades” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
To avert suspicions, the users sandwich political remarks between neutral articles on travelling, cooking and pets.[25] They overwhelm comment sections of media to render meaningful dialogue impossible.[39][40]
This is why I left reddit. I would say 1 in 10 accounts is one of these. It is crazy.
Putin's idea of making Russia stronger of bringing everyone else down to their level, instead of making actual improvements in Russia.
Lmao that's hilarious. This is quite literally "are my views extremist? No, the libruls must be wrong"
Fuck man, some day Elon is gonna come out and say that people should drink more water or something and I’m going to really struggle.
I mean it’s extremely unlikely because that would be a simple thing we would be doing without anything in it for him, so it basically won’t happen
Am I reading the article correctly when I put the dividing line between right wing and left wing somewhere in the "other" section?
yeah. Renew is pretty neo-liberal but they have lately moved a bit more socially conservative, especially on immigration.
They wanted to kick out the Swedish Liberal party from Renew because they are collaborating with the far right here. Renew allowed them to stay in the group. So yeah, they are not directly against the far right either.
Putin, russian czar: 'Divide and conquer!' Orban: 'Great, western ukraine is hungarian territory now!' Rest of Europe: 'Who would have known? It is the fault of the immigrants!' /S
I bet, a lot of people felt that way throughout history.
However, given we have the internet, the best access for information we ever had, it's really ridiculous how little people seem to care about spending some time to critically think about their election choice.
Which should tell us that access to information wasn't the problem.
Personally, I think the problem is that the internet allows the worst of humanity to congregate in a virtual space. The sort of people who would have felt completely alone with their "political opinions" (usually involving literal murder) before the internet – because they're such horrifying pieces of shit that nobody wanted anything to do with them – can now find likeminded human garbage online, and feel like their opinions are actually common, acceptable and mainstream. Couple that with the ability to spread disinformation as efficiently as information, and you end up where we are now. There's a reason why so many mass murderers have gotten their "education" on online forums like the various chans. And this isn't even getting into using machine learning to influence peoples' opinions like what corporations Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have provably done already and all in the service of the psychotic conservative agenda, which is a whole 'nother can of worms likely even worse than what we had before.
I unironically think that the internet was a mistake and will be our undoing.
Edit: relevant may-may
I think future historians will also come to the conclusion that a large factor contributing to the current rise of fascism in Western democracies was a very successful hybrid war effort by Putin's Russia.
I mean it's already pretty obvious that European and US fascists have very close ties to Russian agents. Putin is waging a global digital war - combining old propaganda techniques with social media echo chambers - and we're losing hard right now.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree, and the biggest reason Russians have been so successful with their disinformation campaign is the internet.
The internet isn’t bad itself.
It’s the fact that bad actors (rich companies, power hungry people, and especially authoritarian states) can hire millions of people and create millions of bots to intentionally spread their narratives on social media. This is immoral, so good actors don’t do it.
No one talks about the problem or acknowledges it. Social Media needs regulation to prevent this, or it will be our undoing.
We kinda can blame the internet for letting a bot present itself as a human. If secure ID was in the infrastructure, better content. If all value production were rewarded with money and value destruction taxed, even better.
Who gets to define "value production" and "value destruction"?
Also, assuming that the problem is automatons producing false information instead of just regular 'ol fuckwits is, in my view, misguided. A huge chunk of the of bullshit online is probably not produced by automated systems but by actual humans – they may be working for bullshit farms like the Russian "Internet Research Agency", but they're human nonetheless.
Sure, the internet itself isn't bad or good, but human nature being what it is means that this is what we get. Regulating it wouldn't stop shitty humans from finding each other on it
edit: also consider that the worst of humanity are generally the ones with the most power right now; they have no interest in making the internet better
Don't fall for the propaganda, the only thing these corrupted politicians will blow up is peasants and their rights. You wish they would blow up the rulers glass palace but they are just going to sit there and do what other rulers do
Yes we are
You had far right parties winning elections or with great results in major European countries. Even the EPP has some fucked up policies/members and is not shy about talking to the far right.