The Puppeteers

It was two days ago I think, when I saw a post on X, referring to an carticle post by a well known news platform. The guy basically posted a TLTR, pointing out that a couple in the article moved to Italy's countryside, for a cheaper and happier life, then after 6 months gave up on the idea and planning to move back to the US, because Italians don't speak English.

I left a comment on the post and what came after still seems shocking. Likes started pouring in, like never before. In an hour, my comment got 200 likes and 14k views. Others got more, don't worry, some comments got 100k views. You have to be insane to think that was organic, so I checked a few accounts that liked my comment and saw the majority were not new accounts, but with few followers. At the end of the day, my comment got to 22k views and God knows how many likes.

Photo by Mavi Atlas on Unsplash

Then when I thought this was over, came another surprise. I saw someone else, posting that European schools are much more strict and burden kids with too much homework, referring to the same article. Obviously comments started to build up and impressions on both the article and comments blew off the roof again.

Then today I came across another post, saying ex-soviet countries .... and referring to the same article. I can't even remember what it said but I'm sure Italy has never been a soviet country. Most likely there are hundreds of such posts, each saying something, referring to the same article and this goes to show the intention behind this action or I can call it campaign as well as it seems that's exactly what it was.

Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash

Thinking of what I have just witnessed, brought back some old memories about a comic group that had a very funny play once. There were 5 people sitting on a bench. The first whispered something to the to the next one, who whispered something to the next one and so on. The joke is, that the first message whispered was "there is radiation on the beach" and the message that reached the last one, somehow (we know exactly how) became "the government has fallen". I will never forget this scene and even though it was decades ago, you can recognize this effect so often today.

Due to trading, I'm a regular on X and see a lot of things, but have never noticed any campaign of this magnitude, with such a clear intention of pushing a message and try to mislead the masses. To me, it seemed like a avalanche, but I think you call it snowball effect, if I'm not mistaken.

Photo by János Venczák on Unsplash

The original article was published by an outlet requiring subscription, so I can guarantee you, not even 0.001% read the original article and yet so many reacted the the post, what had very little or nothing to do with the original article. The meaning got distorted completely at the end, if there's an end to it yet.

I'd like to think this was an isolated case and it's never going to happen again, but would be naive to think that.

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Last week I saw something similar, but nowhere near of this magnitude. Hungary had elections on the 12th of April and the opposition was able to win with an astonishing majority, sending home the prime minister after 16 years of domination. The new prime minister elect gave a speech after the results were in and asked the president of Hungary (and a lot of other officials named by the old ruling party) to resign. You can guess, X got flooded with comments like this is abuse of power and similar ones insinuating this is illegal.

What they didn't know and didn't care either is, that in Hungary, the president is named by the ruling party and the current one has just lost support, so it's just a matter of time till the mandate of the president expires, but he can also resign and leave early. There's nothing abusive about it, but as the masses have no idea about how the system works, they commented on what they were served.

Photo by János Venczák on Unsplash

Manipulation got to an unimaginable level and it's becoming a more and more dangerous tool in the hands of some people. The other problem is, the amount of people that can be manipulated so easily is growing day by day as well. It's easier to take sides without know what's true or not, then to check facts and actually learn something that can help you in the future. It gets even more dangerous, when it comes to kids, as they are more vulnerable in this regard.

I see so many people dying to get their content monetized on X, they think it's easy to get rich this way and would do anything to get the necessary metrics. But this? It's madness.

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