i think i’ve landed on a pretty simple theory of why so many people turn to alt news sources nowadays
they want to feel like active participants, not irrelevant spectators

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🅐🅩🅛 Retweeted Samo Burja
broadcast media encourages people to outsource their thinking to pundits. it’s a mechanism through which talking heads impose their worldview on the publichttps://twitter.com/samoburja/status/1144631826440511488?s=21 …
🅐🅩🅛 added,
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alt media makes otherwise powerless people feel like they can participate in the fact-finding process, do their own research, come to their own conclusions, etc. Fox pioneered this with their tagline “we report, you decide”
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conspiracy theorizing is in some ways a very democratic urge. it’s filling the void created by mass media, it’s an antidote to decades of learned helplessness otoh, most mainstream media says “here are all the bad things happening rn, and you can’t do anything about them”
pic.twitter.com/uEZaCuJSHT
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@SamoBurja writes about “live players vs. dead players” aka generative, creative people vs. people who act according to predictable scripts early 20th century media was created for the purpose of turning the public into easy-to-manage dead playershttps://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2 …1 reply 7 retweets 21 likesShow this thread -
the popularity of fake news is a side effect of the infantilizing ethos that was implicit in broadcast media from the beginning traditional gatekeepers are incredulous at the moment because their influence went unquestioned for many years
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the cat is out of the bag now. trying to save real news through better factchecking or a fancy blockchain solution is like trying to preserve the catholic church’s power during the Reformation it will continue to exist, but won’t ever recapture its monopoly over the narrative
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Yes! Yes! I'm familiar with these spaces via my mother, an extreme conspiracy theorist. They want to explore and participate and share with each other. It's community and connection and creating hope where there was none before.
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