Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "What Turns Conspiracy Theorists into Killers? | Truth Hurts" video.

  1. Agreed with the video, but still, I think there's more to it than only that. See, years ago, before Qanon, before far right, before Trump, before all this crap - in discussions like these, about terrorism, about cults, about serial killers - we all knew there were some people with tendencies towards psychopatism, sociopathism, narcisistic disorders and whatnot that are not able to distinguish between fiction and reality, and may haver extreme personal life problems, which leads to them acting violently like that. It's just a thing that you expect to have in any society - a small group of people that are vulnerable to those sorts of things. What is happening now is not just a small group, not limited to cults or extremists, not crazy talk focused on leaders and figureheads... it's far worse. Realize that around half of US electorate voted for Trump twice, there are a whole bunch of people in representative position who believes in these extreme conspiracy theories, and there are networks or private and public financing to promote radical ideas already. So, what are the problems and solutions? I dunno. It's far too complex and far reaching to fully understand at this point. But I'm gonna offer my personal opinion on the matter. First of all, this has to do with global communication networks like social networks and group chat apps going unhinged and unchecked, somehow replacing sources of news and official information. Second, it's about profit motivation. Late stage capitalism and liberal ideals have put the value of advertisement and profit generation over that of privacy, hard news checking, balanced views, and pursuit of truth in general. Third, the US and other countries have allowed, along with global communications, for foreign actors - be it hacker groups, state sponsored groups and whatnot - to interfere with the flow of information inside their own borders. Fourth, a huge ammount of pre estabilished systems of checks and balances fell through over the years when the Internet took over global communications. Collectively, humans as a species cannot take over doing those checks and balances by themselves, because culturally we're just not advanced enough to do it. Seems it's far more likely that we'll get toppled over before coming to this realization. Critical reasoning is not being taught efficiently and fast enough in schools, individuals are not able to adopt the role of journalists by themselves when it comes to fact checking and general ethics, and it's like entire societies got this foundation on how news and information was previously produced suddenly taken off under their feet and they are falling face down into the mud for it. Mass surveillance and coordinated censorship only masks the issue, it can't fight back. The way social networks and tech giants are just banning and blocking people with these outlandish ideologies right now, it does not solve the problem, it only temporarily masks it. When these groups have reached the size they did, with entire political parties, private businesses and large masses of people funding them, it won't take long for them to form their own alt-Internet infrastructure. And because we let the whole thing fester, we long ignored, we long didn't give proper attention to this issue, it's not gonna be an easy thing to revert. Because it has reached cultural level, it's not a fringe group here and there anymore, it's bigger than international terrorist groups, a huge percentage of americans already believe in stuff like that to some degree. So, what I'm saying is, tech giants will have to be broken off, global/Internet communications will need to have better monitoring and get better segmented, social networks will need to be put back into their original purposes - which is not and should never have been sources of unverified information, replacing the role of traditional news -, advertisement agencies will need to get regulated along with this parallel economy of mass private data harvesting and sales with major funding of harvesting machines that goes unverified and unregulated, sources of funding will need to be investigated and regulated, laws will need to be created, privacy needs to be recovered, and a further series of things will need to happen before we get anywhere near a state of normality. And it's much easier for the opposite to happen and countries like the US getting permanently into this new reailty where fringe groups are not just a tiny portion of the population, but rather a huge political party. The problem is that we let things fester for so long that late stage capitalism found a profit mode there, and it's not letting go until the country self implodes from it. These tech giants are not worried about the effects of the stuff they do to society, including the society that birthed them in the first place - they are ready to move out once everything starts collapsing. Changes needed to combat what is happening are coming a full decade too late. And sneaking around meekly about it won't have enough strength to change all that. There are concepts and ideals on modern democracy that needs to be better defined and better estabilished so it's not confused as a way for people to use it against the system itself. Now, there are multiple ways to go around it, but we cannot afford wasting more time deciding on how to start. Again, my opinion, but things should start moving right away. Dismantling tech giants should not take a decade or more to happen, it needs to happen now. Revision of laws, constitution and whatnot to protect what really matters in democracy needs to happen now. Combatting effects of late stage capitalism needs to happen now. Regulating and dismantling the parallel economy of mass private data selling to advertisement networks needs to happen now. Passing laws and getting to sources of funding on these misinformation and conspiracy theory networks needs to happen now. Finding diplomatic ways of extinguishing foreign actors, bot networks, hacker groups, and misinformation groups that comes from outside to exploit fragilities in national communication systems needs to happen now. If an attack on the capitol wasn't enough, the next domestic terrorism attack will happen soon enough. The more we let happen without a proper response, the worse it gets. And the worse it gets, the more likely a response in the future will become catastrophic in itself. And something that people needs to understand is that this type of violent cult like conspiracy theory thinking, this blind faith belief system, this radical extremists way of seeing things... it's very much like an addiction. It dominates peoples' lives and occupies all their time. It's worse than deprogramming brainwashing, worse than cleaning up drug addicts, because it demands a complete start over. So the longer countries let these things fester and take over, the harshest the actions needed to fight back will be, the worst consequences will be for those people, and the more chances you have of them taking over rather than rationality fighting back.
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