Let’s be honest. Just about anyone with any common sense could’ve told you over 10 years ago a lot of the social media posts and chatter was from bots. When South Park did an entire episode over sponsored content, it wasn’t the best, but it was a warning sign.
The newspaper company I worked for had started doing this around 2013. The concept they proposed was people paying us to write stories about them. But it was mostly for companies and business that were all for-profit. Non-profits and civic groups offer received free press mainly because the context was for charity or fund-raising.
But the problem I kept running into was all of the business people thought that since I was the editor of a community newspaper, the focus should be on the businesses because they serve the community. The advertising department sold some of their customers on this concept years earlier which made many of us upset because they expected news stories published yesterday about what they were doing.
In many ways, it was just the business side of media trying hard as possible to get some extra bucks because many of them had dragged their feet in the 1990s and early 2000s and lost a lot of money off the Internet from the start and never fully recovered. Yet, I could tell reading a lot of this “Clickbait” and other posts it was all made up. Some of the stuff didn’t have a byline and those that did use outrageous fake names. And some of the content read like it was made up anyway.
However, I wasn’t the target audience. It was the gullible people who believed that a website that looked professional was professional. It was almost 20 years since Stephen Glass was able to fool so many people into believing the stories he wrote for The New Republic were real. Many people didn’t have a concept of what a website should look like. I didn’t even get an e-mail address until my first year in college in September of 1997. The first time I had ever seen a website link was on an advertisement for the re-release of the original trilogy of Star Wars in Autumn of 1995.
And even then, there was skepticism about things that were on the Internet.
Late last month, Twitter or X had a new feature that let everyone know from where the users were posting. And lo and behold, it was revealed most of the “red-blooded MAGA” Trump supporters were nothing more than scammers from other countries trying to cash in on gullible people. For many people, this was vindication for what many of us had believed all along.
I mean anyone could’ve deduced a lot of these users were just posting stuff to get the Trumpsters on their side and to click on their posts to get money. The sad part is a lot of this has led to the end of friendships and “No Contact” between family members. I know a lot of people who just love Trump and think he is the best ever.
Yet, I’ve never seen why. He’s not a good businessman and he never was. The brutal irony that so many people who support him are the ones who work in the employment fields he has notoriously screwed over for decades. In real life, a lot of the woke college liberals the right wants blue-collar people to despise care more about them than the wealthy elite conservatives. If you can keep the social classes fighting amongst themselves, the wealthy can keep getting away with a lot more thing.
Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she is done supporting Trump and resigning from Congress. Yet, she was in it long enough to have a full-time pension the rest of her life. She’s attuned to the scam like so many other people. Then, there are those questions as if she had anything to do with the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection coup attempt.
I still argue that Trump never wanted the rules and responsibilities of being President. He just liked the campaigning in 2016 and was going to pocket as much money as he could along the way. People who love attention have to have it more like heroin. In any other modern civilized country, Hillary Clinton would’ve been the President as they don’t use an outdated (and somewhat illegal) concept of an Electoral College.
Yet for those that expected Trump to put on his big boy pants on Jan. 20, 2017 realized he had no plans to do that. Instead he was going to continue to milk the system for all he could. And he continues to do it because so many people are scared shitless of admitting they’re wrong.
The last 10 years have been some of the worst in American history. However, there have been worse times. But it seems like every time we’re on a progressive slope, we have to go back farther than we were to begin with. While some people have always had disagreements over politics, there’s a big difference between having educated debates over how and where the government should spend money and whether certain people should be arrested and detained indefinitely.
I didn’t really agree with him on a lot of things but William F. Buckley would be disgusted the way conservatives now just think they should shout the loudest and insult people. And even Buckley would be considered “woke” by some of these people.
Going back to Elon Musk’s social media, they quickly disabled the location notification. But the damage was already done.
However, there will still be people defending Musk, Trump and everything saying that it was really just a small ratio in comparison. The numbers at the recent elections don’t lie. People are fed up. And this wasn’t the midterms.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 