For months, the Erica Marsh account had raised suspicions among online misinformation experts due to her lack of a real-world footprint and her devotion to attention-grabbing viewpoints one called “cartoonishly liberal.”
Did Erica Marsh even talk about technology? Or is this just categorized as technology because of twitter? Because this sounds like a post you’d see in politics or news…
edit: looking at the web archive post, this has as much to do with technology as posting from any site on the internet. This is a politics post.
Imagine being so inundated in social media that you don’t even recognize it as technology anymore.
It’s redundant to call it technology. If you accept this as technology, you could accept literally every post on Kbin and lemmy as technology posts, because all of them technically have as much to do with it.
The fake user wasn’t even talking about the platform. They were talking about political viewpoints.
A fake person affected public opinion by interacting with real people, which is only made possible by society’s current relationship with social media. This was done presumably to incite and rage bait for the opposition and supposedly by an outside nation actor, making this an act of cyber warfare. One of many we’ve seen, and more each day. And guess what? The way you combat that kind of information war is by informing the public, especially that circle of people who actually build these technologies (soooo this sub, pretty much).
It is absolutely not redundant to call it a technology topic. How society interacts with and is affected by technology is an exceedingly important topic within technology and it’s continued development it we want it to be for the betterment of humanity and not the enslavement of it. Technology isn’t just how the electrons move, that’s literally only a teensy tiny part of it.
An interesting viewpoint.
Would you have even bothered to write it if you weren’t trying to prove the validity of this article on this community though? Cause none of what you said is in the article.
The article explains: The fake person, what topics they went over, and suggests possibilities as to where they came from.
Hell, look at the OPs post, they were more interested in the political side as of the discussion as well. It’s “we caught this cartoonishly labeled leftwing person wasn’t real!”, not “Twitter made it possible for a fake user to affect mass opinion”
Can I have just one community without American politics shoved into it?
What does this have to do with technology? Seriously? Because she… used a computer?
viral left-wing Twitter account
”cartoonishly liberal”
Friendly reminder that liberals are not leftists, because apparently it still needs to be said
I’m still not clear on why that is, or what the difference is supposed to be. “Liberal” is “left of center” and “conservative” is “right of center”, innit? Help me out here.
It’s a topic that’s maybe a bit too dense and broad to reduce to a single short comment, but trying to simplify things a bit:
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Leftism is quite a nebulous term, its boundaries are delimited differently depending on who you ask. IMO It could be characterized as opposition to the capitalist economic framework (stemming from the question “Can the system be reformed?”, only answers starting with a “No” would be considered leftist). One of the main indicators of something being leftism lies in its adherence to the marxist principle of the working class being the owner of the means of production (or more famously, “seizing the means of production”).
This point in itself would mean democratic socialists (demsocs) are considered leftists but social democrats (socdems) are not. I’m sure lots of people will agree and a lot more won’t about that boundary for “leftism”. -
The conflation of terms like liberal, leftist, communist… into one and the same is a topic deserving of its own dissertation that can only be explained as the resulting image from the warped looking glass that is the current American political landscape, concept that is often illustrated by talking about the shift of the Overton Window. These things in turn can be explained as the lasting echoes of McCarthyism and its Red Scare tactics that had a profound effect on American political discourse.
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Liberalism (another term so broad it would be impossible to fully explain in a few sentences) in its modern conception, and especially as “liberalism” is understood outside of the US, would mean an adherence to market economy ideology and the belief in private property. That would include all the range of positions from “The system is fine just as it is” to “The system is inherently fine it just needs some minor touch-ups” and all of them would find themselves opposed to leftism, which following the analogy would be the position saying “The system IS the problem”.
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If we want to know where any form of society is on the political spectrum (left or right), we need to answer one question: what’s the state role in society? The weaker the state, the more to the left on the spectrum. The stronger the state, the more to the right the formation is. In addition, we can also differentiate between formations by the economic form of society. These two points will give us an exhaustive answer.
Examples:
- Anarchism is no state and no economic formation. Hence, it’s an ultra-leftist faction.
- Communism is no state and no commercial production. Hence, it’s an ultra-leftist faction.
- Libertarianism is no state and free market. Hence, it’s an ultra-leftist faction.
- Socialism is weak state and no commercial production. Hence, it’s a left-wing faction.
- Conservatism is strongly state and monopoly/oligopoly market. Hence, it’s a right-wing faction.
- Fascism is strongly state and state capitalism. Hence, it’s an ultra-right faction.
There are occasional exceptions to these definitions. For instance, at the beginning of socialism there can be a strong state, that must then disappear. The USSR was like that, but it didn’t get to complete socialism.
So liberalism is a centrist ideology. For some topics it’s left of center, for some topics it’s right of center.
After The Washington Post raised questions about the account with employees of Twitter’s trust and safety department, the account was suspended on Sunday for unknown reasons.
Twitter’s trust and safety department still has employees?
Just an inbox that forwards to Elon so he can laugh at inquiries. Jokes aside, they moved on this one because she was caught as a fake in big and loud fashion (WaPo) and if Twitter didn’t, they couldn’t keep up any appearance of bipartisanship. WaPo would’ve just beat the drum louder. This way Twitter hardly even has to comment, and they can deny they promoted the account.
“left-wing”
A self-proclaimed “proud Democrat” that is a poor caricature of a milquetoast neoliberal is not left-wing, but I guess I shouldn’t expect even the bare minimum of political literacy from WaPo.
So one thing people misunderstand about “bots” is that we assume they’re entirely artificial. That is not true. A lot of them are ran by real people and write tweets written by real people. Often times, the real bots are the ones that follow or support the main account, and are there to create an illusion of widespread support.
In case anybody else is at their WP article limit: https://web.archive.org/web/20230706171558/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/04/twitter-erica-marsh-suspended/
Why is this posted twice?
What does it have to do with technology?
Why is a mod posting this crap into this community? Guess it’s time to block this community from my instance if it’s going to turn into political crap.
It’s the same post. You commented here twice. Which is ironic in hilarious ways. I guess you don’t quite understand this technology…
Faking a person in the digital world and then using that likeness to affect real world politics has everything to do with technology by the way. We don’t only discuss the bleeding edge of new consumer toys, it’s a pretty broad topic. And politics being the process of how people function together in society … I mean it’s gonna be everywhere.
If you want to unsubscribe I guess, bye.
No, it has to do with politics. Faking identities has been a thing since early chat rooms, and the article doesn’t go into any technological breakthrough they used. It was pretty much just social engineering.
There you go again, pretending technology only has to do with the next breakthrough. I mean did you read what I wrote? I literally talked about that explicitly.
Technology is technology. If it’s relevant today then why shouldn’t it be here? If the US was constructing water wheels again all of the sudden it would be a technology topic and relevant to this sub.
If you don’t like it and you’re leaving, great. There’s the door, what makes you think anyone cares? Or ought to?
On a technicality point of course not.
On a point of quality you’d basically flood the community with threads most people aren’t interested in on that logic. And probably turn technology into an American Politics/News community.
It’s too low a bar to be considered technology. It’s not even going into how twitter allowed it to happen. It’s just the fact this one user exists and talks about politics.
Be the change you want to see then brother, post what quality content you think ought to be seen and shared. You’re allowed to.
Are you suggesting the community is dead and needs politics/news?
Are you admitting you don’t even contribute and yet you deign to judge the people who do?
I had a feeling this user was fake. Had all the typical conservative ideas of what a liberal, while lacking actual liberal ideals.
Don’t care downvote
