You’ve pointed out problems with (shadow)bans of organic, real person profiles & the uncontrolled spread of right-wing misinformation & propaganda. I’m not talking about accounts of politicians. Politicians are not everyone’s peers. People more strongly engage with messages spread through their network of peers.

That’s why I’m suggesting adopting the same propaganda machine tactics. That includes bots feigning right-wing accounts to gain clout with right-wing communities, then when they have enough credibility, deftly inject left-wing ideas into “right-wing propaganda”, spread misinformation damaging the right, denounce right-wing figures as not “right-wing” enough. Fight lies with lies, inflame tensions, cut rifts into the right.

Since you’re referring to Brazil, another article on the topic mentions

To Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Amadeu, “online social networks and platforms controlled by big tech companies are geopolitical structures increasingly aligned with the far right.” In June, at seminars held by Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal party (PL), executives from Meta gave workshops teaching how to use AI and achieve greater reach on the platform.

The left could very well do likewise to “use AI and achieve greater reach on the platform”. Instead of resist and try to restrict the lies & propaganda, they could embrace & turn the same tactics against them.

they would never allow such botting for left wing ideas like they do fascists.

I’ve yet to see that. Social media like reddit is overrun with bots & fake content that they seem unable or uninterested to prevent. It’s an arms race between platform operators & bot operators working new ways to raise & defeat moderator controls. Shit gets through anyway. It’s a matter of competing & doing in kind.

mainstream online platforms themselves are not neutral

Unless you mean they’re not neutral about whatever yields income, I’m not sure that’s conclusive. Their “algorithm” optimizes for keeping users online regardless of what does that. A particular political orientation isn’t necessary to do that. That current ragebait predominantly leans right-wing may just reflect who’s putting the resources to sustain a ragebaiting campaign & evade bans. While I’ve seen signs & reports of the right gaining influence through viral propaganda & attempts to dominate mainstream platforms, I see little sign of the left seriously doing that.

When foreign adversaries weaponize social media, instead of putting out one-sided propaganda, they target friction points by trying to manipulate people on both sides. They’d not only push supportive propaganda, but also radicalizing propaganda to discredit the “supported” side to itself & inflame divisions.

Maybe some propaganda is needed to inflame right-wing divisions & exploit their contradictions. Left-wing propaganda could be put out in guises that appear right-wing and probably catch on: the right isn’t exceptionally bright.

The left does ignore this problem or get wrapped up in their useless “big picture” rhetoric that leads nowhere when this is a very practical, tangible problem. Dominating over the right-wing propaganda machine is the obvious answer. When I suggest the left needs their own propaganda bots & troll farms flooding social media, their own podcasters & influencers to propagate their propaganda, better engagement through local organizations to answer & counteract right-wing bullshit & push some of their own to keep the right-wing occupied, I get responses like

This is such a boomer take. This is like trying to claim Clinton lost in 2016 because she didn’t tweet enough or use the right young-person slang, skibidi

or digressions like the comments here that dismiss everything as another problem to pin on capitalism without offering constructive ideas that could seriously lead anywhere. A left-wing propaganda machine to outdo the right-wing is doable, I doubt propaganda bots would cost a fortune to set up. The loser mentality of just venting about impractical shit instead of organize & reach for practical solutions is a major part of the problem.

By diminishing people’s ability to complain

No one’s diminishing. A critique of dumb complaints is also a complaint. Are you diminishing their ability to complain? Welcome to complaining.

lol, you make lemmy angry with delicious ragebait. that beehive is worth striking. 🍿

self-cleaning/pyrolytic oven on wheels

I think Adam Smith would have a lot to say about this. Specifically, he would probably point out that the slave states really had an awfully small economy compared to the free states, and that most of the wealth generation which occurred in the US occurred due to productivity gains driven by technological innovations which were most aggressively exploited in the north. In the long run, few people could claim to have really benefitted noticeably from american slavery - it was just a shitty thing to do for no reason.

Some historians appear to agree with additional support. During the 18th century, the slave economy was significant in the expansion of industry & commerce, but its value declined & was no longer needed by the 19th century. Slave-intensive sugar production that dominated the 18th century became less important in the 19th century as shipment of cotton products to international markets grew in significance. Unlike sugar, cotton had less need for slaves, and early cotton growers used slaves primarily because they were already slave-owners.

Insurgent scholars known as New Historians of Capitalism argue that slavery, specifically slave-grown cotton, was critical for the rise of the U.S. economy in the 19th century. In contrast, I argued that although industrial capitalism needed cheap cotton, cheap cotton did not need slavery. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Early mainland cotton growers deployed slave labour not because of its productivity or aptness for the new crop, but because they were already slave owners, searching for profitable alternatives to tobacco, indigo, and other declining crops. Slavery was, in effect, a ‘pre-existing condition’ for the 19th-century American South.

Slavery restrained economic development of the south, causing it to underperform economically: while it unevenly concentrated the lesser wealth produced there, the lesser wealth produced there benefitted the rest of the economy less than it could have. Free states didn’t benefit from the less wealth concentrated elsewhere.

To be sure, U.S. cotton did indeed rise ‘on the backs of slaves’, and no cliometric counterfactual can gainsay this brute fact of history. But it is doubtful that this brutal system served the long-run interests of textile producers in Lancashire and New England, as many of them recognized at the time. As argued here, the slave South underperformed as a world cotton supplier, for three distinct though related reasons: in 1807 the region closed the African slave trade, yet failed to recruit free migrants, making labour supply inelastic; slave owners neglected transportation infrastructure, leaving large sections of potential cotton land on the margins of commercial agriculture; and because of the fixed-cost character of slavery, even large plantations aimed at self-sufficiency in foodstuffs, limiting the region’s overall degree of market specialization. The best evidence that slavery was not essential for cotton supply is demonstrated by what happened when slavery ended. After war and emancipation, merchants and railroads flooded into the southeast, enticing previously isolated farm areas into the cotton economy. Production in plantation areas gradually recovered, but the biggest source of new cotton came from white farmers in the Piedmont. When the dust settled in the 1880s, India, Egypt, and slave-using Brazil had retreated from world markets, and the price of cotton in Liverpool returned to its antebellum level. See Figure 2.

Here’s how to quote

> quoted text

how to write a list

1) point: spaces matter
2) another point

how to do both

1) > quoted text

   discussion of quoted text

   another paragraph
2) another point

You can learn this & more from any markdown guide like the one shown when using the help button in the lemmy toolbar.

So, you’re digging into breaking web accessibility. What did the disabled do to you to deserve this abuse? Do you kick crutches & obstruct service animals, too?

You could have done

1. The extra…
2. The like/dislike…
3. The flow…

Instead, you went with the counterintuitive & unnatural

1 . The extra…

2 . The like/dislike…

3 . The flow…

which takes special effort. This ain’t making sense.

Welcome to democracy & divided, partisan voters.

1 .

Bizarre. Did you mangle lists on purpose to impair web accessibility just because?

Vote enough non-Republicans into Congress, impeach, and convict? Wait for whatever is turning his skin purple to take its course?

I find doing AI impressions an effective trolling technique: beep bip boop & some fun punctuation ‒−–—―…:.

Is that another way to say you can’t? It is.

We can all see you’re making unfounded assumptions. Making more when your ego is threatened (by claiming anyone who calls out your baseless assumptions is right-wing in lemmy of all places), tossing insults, and refusing to rationally support your point doesn’t help your credibility. It just makes you a sore loser.

Stay mad: your opinion remains worthless & you need to work on your narcissism.

They can also be funny with them. Comedy doesn’t need or care about preconceived constraints. Irreverence that challenges our arrogant conformity & self-indulgent vanity that anything is sacred or off-limits is a goal of comedy. It’s part of gaining humility to question & laugh at ourselves & conceited ideas.

yes

or primaries

a spoiler effect happens when a losing candidate affects the results of an election simply by participating

Vote splitting is the most common cause of spoiler effects in FPP. In these systems, the presence of many ideologically-similar candidates causes their vote total to be split between them, placing these candidates at a disadvantage. This is most visible in elections where a minor candidate draws votes away from a major candidate with similar politics, thereby causing a strong opponent of both to win.

That the US voting system lacks the sincere favorite criterion is mathematical fact: lesser-evil voting is necessary to avoid losing the best chance of getting anyone preferable to the worst major candidate. Denying that is like denying laws of physics. You can’t coerce logic & causality to your will. Just because you don’t understand that doesn’t mean others don’t. Primaries exist to select better major party candidates.

Viable 3rd party candidates requires voting reform, which again requires passing those reforms through the current system.

Still unnecessary & less effective than less invasive alternatives that already exist & the government could promote. To quote another comment

Governments have commissioned enough studies to know that education, training, and parental controls filtering content at the receiving end are more effective & less infringing of civil rights than laws imposing restrictions & penalties on website operators to comply with online age verification. Laws could instead allocate resources to promote the former in a major way, setup independent evaluations reporting the effectiveness of child protection technologies to the public, promote standards & the development of better standards in the industry. Laws of the latter kind simply aren’t needed & also suffer technical defects.

The most fatal technical defect is they lack enforceability on websites outside their jurisdiction. They’re limited to HTTP (or successor). They practically rule out dynamic content (chat, fora) for minors unless that content is dynamically prescreened. Parental control filters lack all these defects, and they don’t adversely impact privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement.

Governments know better & choose worse, because it’s not about promoting the public good, it’s about imposing control.