It’s targetting mainly the MAGAs because they’re the less intellectually capable population
I’ve seen a flood of “I’m a Palestinian who is struggling to survive, please send me money” posts and PMs on BlueSky and Instagram and other liberal-leaning social media. Folks love to believe their team is the “smarties” and the opposition is the “dummies”. Nobody likes to believe they’d be ripe for exploitation.
Consequently, your refusal to believe in your own gullibility and bias opens you up to scammers.
I bet this whole phenomenon is mainly a “emergent property” of the rewards and access structures in place in Social Media and that the top-down organised ops from state actors are but a tiny fraction of this shit show.
Like everything else capitalist, it starts out as an independent venture and congeals into national industry as the rate of return grows. The modern era of internet scamming is just the latest in a long history of affinity scams and MLM schemes. People are drawn in out of fear, confusion, and desperation. And because the better scammers know to tip their political overclass, these scam factories tend to be insulated from any kind of regulation or public prosecution.
People who have a higher level of Education and have to think for a living are less prone to fall for pure lies + strong displays of emotion and instead tend to fall for context/information-control scams + pushing of subconscious buttons, and as it so happens the Republicans tend to use more the former kind of scam whilst the Democrats the latter (none of which “my” “team” as I’m not even American).
As it so happens, outright lies and emotional raging are far more accessible for foreign scammers than the more subtle kinds of manipulation (which are more common in the Press: for example how in most of the Press in the Israeli Gaza Genocide, Israelis are “killed” whilst Palestinians merely “die”).
I totally agree with the rest of your post. Widespread scamming is a natural thing in Capitalism.
The whole emergent property element is how, due to in the modern age external scammers that aren’t even directly involved in US politics and thus don’t gain from side A or side B being able to still make money from view alone, as a group they have had a systemic impact in the use politics - those individual actions of individuals who aren’t actually organized (as they’re not even in those political parties) combined to do (or at least accelerate) a systemic change in the politics of the US.
Maybe (probably?) scams around politics in Capitalism also do combine in an emergent way from bottom up to shape each nations’ politics as a whole, but this is the first time a large fraction of the actors in that don’t directly gain from being in politics or receiving political patronage, and instead merely gain from using rage to get attention (more specifically, clicks), and I believe that has caused something else to emerge from it at a systemic level than what there was before since these people care even less about the possible destruction that their actions might cause since they themselves will never suffer from it.
People who have a higher level of Education and have to think for a living are less prone to fall for pure lies + strong displays of emotion
That’s simply not true. Education does not negate emotion. Nor does it negate the consequences of old age or the erosive effect of decades of propaganda. Hell, “education” in the abstract isn’t even well-defined. You get a degree from Liberty University and you’re not going to come out more Woke than some kid with a GED busting ass in the dockworker’s union or organizing Starbucks and Walmart workers.
I believe that has caused something else to emerge from it at a systemic level than what there was before since these people care even less about the possible destruction that their actions might cause since they themselves will never suffer from it.
Definitely not good to see people farther and farther removed from the ramifications of their actions. That said, this is right in line with the 19th century quackery and fly-by-night scams that plagued the laisse-faire economy of the era.
I wouldn’t say its creating a new ideology so much as resurrecting an old one.
I’ve seen a flood of “I’m a Palestinian who is struggling to survive, please send me money” posts and PMs on BlueSky and Instagram and other liberal-leaning social media. Folks love to believe their team is the “smarties” and the opposition is the “dummies”. Nobody likes to believe they’d be ripe for exploitation.
Consequently, your refusal to believe in your own gullibility and bias opens you up to scammers.
Like everything else capitalist, it starts out as an independent venture and congeals into national industry as the rate of return grows. The modern era of internet scamming is just the latest in a long history of affinity scams and MLM schemes. People are drawn in out of fear, confusion, and desperation. And because the better scammers know to tip their political overclass, these scam factories tend to be insulated from any kind of regulation or public prosecution.
People who have a higher level of Education and have to think for a living are less prone to fall for pure lies + strong displays of emotion and instead tend to fall for context/information-control scams + pushing of subconscious buttons, and as it so happens the Republicans tend to use more the former kind of scam whilst the Democrats the latter (none of which “my” “team” as I’m not even American).
As it so happens, outright lies and emotional raging are far more accessible for foreign scammers than the more subtle kinds of manipulation (which are more common in the Press: for example how in most of the Press in the Israeli Gaza Genocide, Israelis are “killed” whilst Palestinians merely “die”).
I totally agree with the rest of your post. Widespread scamming is a natural thing in Capitalism.
The whole emergent property element is how, due to in the modern age external scammers that aren’t even directly involved in US politics and thus don’t gain from side A or side B being able to still make money from view alone, as a group they have had a systemic impact in the use politics - those individual actions of individuals who aren’t actually organized (as they’re not even in those political parties) combined to do (or at least accelerate) a systemic change in the politics of the US.
Maybe (probably?) scams around politics in Capitalism also do combine in an emergent way from bottom up to shape each nations’ politics as a whole, but this is the first time a large fraction of the actors in that don’t directly gain from being in politics or receiving political patronage, and instead merely gain from using rage to get attention (more specifically, clicks), and I believe that has caused something else to emerge from it at a systemic level than what there was before since these people care even less about the possible destruction that their actions might cause since they themselves will never suffer from it.
That’s simply not true. Education does not negate emotion. Nor does it negate the consequences of old age or the erosive effect of decades of propaganda. Hell, “education” in the abstract isn’t even well-defined. You get a degree from Liberty University and you’re not going to come out more Woke than some kid with a GED busting ass in the dockworker’s union or organizing Starbucks and Walmart workers.
Definitely not good to see people farther and farther removed from the ramifications of their actions. That said, this is right in line with the 19th century quackery and fly-by-night scams that plagued the laisse-faire economy of the era.
I wouldn’t say its creating a new ideology so much as resurrecting an old one.