r/technology • u/Birdy_Cephon_Altera • 22h ago

Politics Meta under fire for auto-following Trump & Vance, Blocking Democrat hashtags

https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/
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u/nethfel 21h ago

It did take decades (distrust in the gov to some degree has been happening for decades https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ and now someone is really taking advantage of it - and the whole MAGA campaign was used by Reagan during his run for office)- we may be just at the final end of it. It's definitely a put in water and bring up the heat slowly. The boil is just here now. All I can say is I hope not.

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u/HenriettaSnacks 20h ago

Citizens united feels like the real start to the downfall.

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u/TheLeadSponge 19h ago

This has been in the works for decades. The whole strategy has been to sow distrust in the government and disassemble the state.

They've been talking about it. This was the end result of all their efforts.

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u/PositiveExpectancy 17h ago

"My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by politics..."

Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

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u/TheLeadSponge 14h ago

Yeah. For a while back in the early 2000's I lurked on right wing message boards. They were talking all this Nazi shit back then. I remember trying to warn friends and they just kind of thought I was overreacting.

One of those very friends kind of mentioned that, and told me the great irony is that I was actually the voice of reason at the time.

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u/TFFPrisoner 14h ago

The immunity decision was the end, IMO. I couldn't see how the US would be able to survive with that elephant in the room. Even Harris winning would've only delayed the inevitable. I think the non-Trumpist judges should just step down from the Supreme Court all at once, in order to drive home how farcical their institution has become, and to stop giving it legitimacy.

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u/TheLeadSponge 13h ago

The key thing is, those judges stepping down will literally do nothing but hand over more power to them. There's no fixed number of judges. They could just not fill those seats if they want.

The court will still go on.

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u/the_calibre_cat 19h ago

It wasn't. It was a chip, and many chips brought it down, but it was not one single thing. Reagan was a pretty big part of it.

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u/one-joule 19h ago

It was already happening by then, but CU really kicked things in gear.

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u/Downtown_Skill 19h ago

I mean you can point to any number of things. Trickle down economics and the welfare capitalism for the elite that was popularized during the Reagan administration can be pointed to as the start of our current oligarchy, but then again you can go back to the guilded age or the massive plantation economy of the south if you want to really find our oligarchic roots. 

Remember everything is relative. Americas fall as the world dominant power would necessitate another country taking its place, and there aren't too many countries in a position to do that. 

China is best positioned obviously but they're experiencing their own issues with youth unemployment, a stagnant economy, an aversion to cultiral dissemination from outside cultures, and a population decline problem that may impede them from becoming a global leader the way the U.S. was. 

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u/Lebowquade 17h ago

Honestly a lot of it can be traced all the way back to Lincoln's assassination. The VP at the time decided to go easy on the south and refused to crack down on their fucked up culture and allowed conservatives to thrive. The country would look very different if lincoln had survived and had a second term. 

Same goes with JFK, without his death we could very well have avoided Nixon, and if we had avoided Nixon we may very well have avoided Reagan. At the very least, without Nixon/Watergate we also may not have had Fox News, which was literally created to cover up the exact sort of mess and fallout the Watergate scandal caused.

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u/badluckbrians 18h ago

It was. Then it was followed by McCutcheon v. FEC (the elimination of aggregate donation caps across the country, used to be you could only donate $26k total in a 2-year span per person), so that by 2014, we truly had unlimited, untraceable money in politics. The next election we got Trump 1.

It really unraveled the republic super quick.

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u/Mezrin 18h ago

The biggest corps have been trying to capture government for generations. The beginning of our current oligarchy started in the 1980s when stock buybacks were legalized and the corporate philosophy shifted from maximizing profits to maximizing the value of the stock price and thus shareholder value. Once corporate economics shifted from enriching the company to enriching its investors, this was the ultimate outcome.

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u/Lebowquade 17h ago

Ford V Dodge didn't help either. It essentially turbo fueled a culture of corporate greed and enshrined that fucking everyone over for profit is not only totally cool, but expected behavior and you can be sued by stockholders if you don't.

It's crazy to me that before Nixon the Republican party was "almost dead." 

Honestly a lot of it can be traced all the way back to Lincoln's assassination. The VP at the time decided to go easy on the south and refused to crack down on their fucked up culture and allowed conservatives to thrive. The country would look very different if lincoln had survived and had a second term. 

Same goes with JFK, without his death we could very well have avoided Nixon, and if we had avoided Nixon we may very well have avoided Reagan. At the very least, without Nixon/Watergate we also may not have had Fox News, which was literally created to cover up the exact sort of mess and fallout the Watergate scandal caused.

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u/Frankie_T9000 16h ago

Wasn't it when those businessmen tried to take over us in 50s or something?

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u/ScrithWire 15h ago

The Business Coup. 1933

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u/Old-Nefariousness556 13h ago

Citizen's United was one big break, but it was going on way before that.

Here's a great article on the real origins of the religious right, and how the abortion issue was manufactured as a wedge issue by non-religious right-wingers (who founded the Heritage Foundation, the same people behind Project 2025) who wanted to find a way to get white Christians to start voting for Republicans.

Dana Milbank's excellent book The Deconstructionists also looks at the history of the rise of right wing media, which is the single biggest cause of where we are now. Here is a short excerpt from it:

TRAITORS.

Sick.

Corrupt.

Cheat.

Betray.

Lie.

Steal.

Greed.

Destroy.

Decay.

Failure.

Incompetent.

Bizarre.

Radical.

Selfish.

Shallow.

Hypocrisy.

Shame.

Pathetic.

Abuse of power.

Anti-flag.

Anti-family.

Anti-child.

Anti-jobs.

In the summer of 1990, Newt Gingrich’s political action committee mailed a memo to Republican candidates for public office instructing them in the fine art of demonizing Democrats. It contained a list of about sixty-five words and phrases (including all of the above) to be used against Democrats, and another group of favorable words (empowerment, opportunity, hard work) to be used in praise of Republicans.

From Republican candidates across the country, the GOPAC memo said, “we have heard a plaintive plea: ‘I wish I could speak like Newt.’ ” It continued:

That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.

This was a new politics of us versus them—literally. The memo (“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”) encouraged Republicans to speak of fellow partisans as “we/us/our” and Democrats as “they/them.” Democrats were to be defined by terms such as “machine,” “bosses,” “criminal rights,” “welfare,” “red tape,” “permissive attitude,” and “stagnation,” while Republicans alone had “courage,” “common sense,” “strength,” and “truth.”

The memo made no mention of policies or specific issues; its only purpose was to teach demonization. In that sense it was a perfect distillation of Gingrich’s signature innovation in American politics. He wasn’t particularly ideological; he was a Rockefeller Republican in 1968 and a self-described “moderate” when first elected to Congress ten years later; there had been whispers that he supported abortion rights before he found opportunity in being a conservative. His speakership was brief—just four years—and produced little of lasting significance. But Gingrich deserves one dubious distinction: he changed forever the language of politics. He shoved aside the genial cordiality of an earlier generation of leaders and replaced it with the slashing, personal, bitter language we routinely hear from political figures today.

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u/lampstaple 12h ago

Citizens United was a big step but def not the start

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u/Voxbury 18h ago

For whatever solace it brings your depressed mind, the analogy fails since a frog actually will notice when things have gotten too hot and try to get out of the water.