I am looking forward to the day that twitter is nothing more than Russian bots arguing with CIA bots arguing with Chinese bots arguing with corporate shill bots. And the only people being fooled are advertisers and twitter investors.
I read an article where Russia's Internet Research Agency learned it was easier to just take existing propaganda and memes, amplify them past the long tail of engagement with their bots, and let the racist hateful online population snowball that message organically for them.
People aren't rational, we are inherently emotional. Reason and logic need to be taught, and controlling your emotions is one of the hardest things you can do as a human. These propaganda just play into our basic primal fears of safety and the unknown at its root. It's not hard to engage with these emotions, especially if what you are sharing already goes along with this established worldview that some have, cultivated by years of past propaganda.
I'm not sure how you reset this, given so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives nor seek them out.
> so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives
I don't think it's that people aren't exposed to other perspectives -- it's that people have been programmed to be vitriol of other perspectives. It's the ever growing polarization of world views.
I think exposure at least offers you the opportunity of engagement with other perspectives. If your dad is racist but you go to school and make a black friend, that might change your perspective vs. if you lived in an area where mostly white people lived, and you had no practical experience to weigh against your dad's racist perspective. A lot of people stay siloed, especially after schooling ends. They work with the same people for decades, attend the same church, or otherwise cement their social circle for the most part, since there are fewer opportunities to meet people from different perspectives as an adult. This is in contrast to say undergrad, where half the kids in your dorm were from another country and everyone is looking to make friends as soon as possible, or public school where you make friends both rich and poor because you don't see class really when you are six years old, you just want to play tag.
