Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/18/engagement-maximization-pat.html
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It makes sense; YouTube was able to help them reach a new audience around the globe across the disk.
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I imagine all kinds of odd and crazy shit is spread by youtube.
Seriously I have seen things that make the old In Search Of show a bastion of sane rational thought.
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What doesn’t YT spread.
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Herpes? (well not directly anyway)
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You bring up a point. Ignorance and plain stupidity (thank you, social media) has been known to be at the root of more than a few diseases and sicknesses. Anti-vaxx bullshit, anyone?
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Sometimes people act like there weren’t dickheads before the internet.
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For the flat-earthers, what do they presume is on the other side of the disc? Is that where the bigfoot and other cryptozoological creatures live? Hell perhaps?
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Flat Earthism is so plainly wrong, stupid and easily disproved by personal investigation that one can only conclude that Flat Earthers don’t really really believe it. In their deepest cognitive bunker they are engaged in a form of “doublethink” which enables them to use Flat Earthism as a means to support some other kind of rationalisation – for example, that the sciences are run by a lying elite for a hidden agenda and must be distrusted.
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Gargoyles. Oh wait, that was Ultima VI.
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Frightening? Wow, you’re easily frightened. Flat-earthers number in the hundreds, except almost none of them really think the world is flat. They are trolls who want to fight on the internet, and you are giving them lots of oxygen.
EDIT: Oh good, I see they’re already here to prove my point.
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It took an hour or two, but I blocked all the flat earther channels a couple years ago. I suppose there’s more now, but I think I convinced YouTube’s algorithm that I really don’t want to see them.
Surely YouTube tracks how many people have outright banned a channel?
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study suggests catholicism spread via pope / bear poop via forest
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Google “flat earth theory” and social media, specifically Youtube, is mentioned constantly as the source for disseminating this nonsense. No big surprise. In fact there are a myriad of conspiracy theories and Youtube has a channel for each one. Anti-vaxers, Pizzagate, false flag operations, chemtrails, the New World Order, Sandy Hook, 9/11, birtherism, the Illuminati, fluoride in water, white genocide, UFOs, to name a few. Something for everyone!
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The excerpt encourages scientists to create round earth videos. Adding videos debunking the other videos at best creates a false equivalency between the two. But anyway, flat earthers aren’t going to watch those videos. The internet, for each and every one of us, is a way to confirm our biases. We don’t consume media that conflicts with those biases. And the algorithms increasingly feeds us media that only confirms them. There’s so much information on the internet, but it still manages to be an echo chamber.
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Popes don’t cause catholicism; catholicism causes Popes.
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That feeling of superiority when you’ve figured out something the majority hasn’t is quite good though.
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The breakdown of the consensus and the youtube videos would never have found fertile ground to take root in, if not for the deplorably shitty quality of science education most people get in school.
As someone who read a ton of nonfiction popular science books for fun as a teenager, and who had two graduate school level botanists as parents, I was constantly boggled from grades 7-12 by the poor quality of information being given to me by my science teachers, and by the number of flat out wrong statements I encountered in my science textbooks. The level of science coverage in the media also seemed pretty gobsmackingly awful.
In a world where issues of science are of life or death importance, the widespread degree of ignorance about science created by public education and journalism is a crime.
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Oh, there were, tons of them. The internet just allows them to spread their message far and wide, and meet others with similar beliefs and ideas, reinforcing each other’s asshole behavior.
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If you’ve got 45 minutes to spend on this, there’s a very entertaining and enlightening hbomberguy video documentary on / debunking of the Flat Earth movement. I think it’s worth it. This video introduced me to hbomberguy, and several of his other debunking videos are also very entertaining.
By excerpting many of the Flat Earther’s own videos, this conveys a sense of Flat Earther’s attitudes, the degree of sophistication and honesty of their thought processes, and overall level of seriousness that may be difficult to convey any other way.
I had only the vaguest idea about the modern Flat Earth movement before seeing it. It’s a troubling movement for some of the same reasons GamerGate was troubling: It seems to attract and embrace people with real problems, to offer them something like a social outlet without addressing their problems.
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