Within hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass-stabbings in Southport, a seaside town in northwest England, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati”—a Muslim migrant to the UK—alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.
None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27m impressions on social media.
The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, with nearly 10m followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat”—even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.
One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may be now run out of an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media”—you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are.
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I’m not a bot.
*corporate. There’s a profit motive for them to encourage the behavior and be addictive
We’re talking on a forum. This is not social media. It has none of the hallmarks of social media, like friending people, following their feeds, or being a spot where you post about your lives. Forums have never been and will never be social media.
Just like Facebook Marketplace isn’t social media, just because you can do something on a site doesn’t mean that site belongs to a completely separate category of sites.
I hate to break it to you, but Reddit and similar fall under the category of social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)