I’ve been thinking about a person’s influence. The more you’re in the public eye, the greater it is. You have reach and power.
Your words matter; what you say can trigger people. Even people you disagree with can take something you say out of context and use it for “justification.”
Emboldening them because they think you’re on their side. Rhetoric is dangerous. It triggers the emotions, and that kicks logic out of the driver’s seat.
“China virus”, heard by people with hate towards Asians, said by a person of power, can add fuel to the fire. Your words matter.
They already think that way; that’s not your responsibility, just don’t add to the fire with rhetoric. People don’t usually think too deep.
Instead, it’s about what they feel.
On top of this, social media clumps us together in echo chambers.
I watched a documentary on Netflix titled The Social Dilemma. People that worked for Facebook and tech companies said social networking algorithms work off an avatar they built of you based on your likes and push stuff into your feed that you may click on.
Pausing or clicking on them gets them money.
The building an audience thing they spoke of, where stuff gets pushed to like-minded people I know well since when I was promoting blog posts by paying for Facebook to boost them, I either built an audience or my page’s fans and friends were my target. The latter was because of their social capital.
Facebook has since said I was spamming and no longer let anything from my WordPress blog get shared.
Google curates search engine auto-fills based on your location. West Coast and you search for climate change, you’ll see positive results saying it’s a threat. Middle of the country, and it swings to being a hoax in the results—search engine echo chambers.
It’s why DuckDuckGo is becoming a popular search engine.
The end credits had lots of practical information like turn off notifications (which I have already) and never click on anything recommended to you online. Also to have a group of friends who have different opinions than you.
Not everyone who thinks differently from you is wrong. One differing opinion doesn’t make a person evil…usually. I’ll admit some do get the side-eye from me.
If you want to argue, argue over the essentials. Decide what that is (together), and defend that.
I will definitely look at my Facebook feed differently. Artificial Intelligence is trying to suck my attention and manipulate me via echo chamber…yeah, not cool.
What I say going out into an echo chamber, well, it may be preaching to the choir, but I’m not only trying to reach the choir.
My kiddo just woke up and is growling at the camera over the crib, so I got to go.
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