The biggest silent driver of the world towards fascism is removal of the ability to get accurate facts and information.
It's not just the propaganda and deliberate misinformation - that's already in full swing.
The removal of the ability to FIND information is critical here.
The recent and very VERY obvious moves to make search engines nearly useless for actual search basically means 2-3 big corporations control our ability to find out what's going on if we don't hear about it for friends and family.
They control whether we find the answers to health questions. They control whether or not we see health data - and governments control whether there is any data for us to see AT ALL (by e.g. removing funding from wastewater monitoring, not publishing data that they do have, not collecting data they should, etc.)
My ex told me that at some point after Chernobyl, it became illegal to own a Geiger counter in Germany. While I don't have verification of this, that is basically where we are right now.
It's hard to be outraged and to organise if you can't see what's actually happening.
It scares the fuck out of me, and I am NOT naturally paranoid.
The rise of the far right on twitter, and the recent announcement that Twitter is to remover itself from the code of conduct around misinformation, makes sense, it makes it a platform which is far more friendly to the far right.
@zleap Well, yes. Twitter has been a lost cause in this regard for a long time.
I find the degradation of search engines, however, much more dangerous and frightening. In the early 2000s, there were lots of different search engines, and Google was not in fact my favourite of them. It got worse when it became almost impossible to do exact string searches because they started doing things like stemming words, etc, so you couldn't find something based on the fact that a very exact phrase occurred in it.
That, at least, makes technological sense (indexing is cheaper that way), but with the excuse of "use AI for everything", we've seen a simultaneous drop in the ability to use search at all in the way most of us have for years, and I don't think it's coincidental.
It's bad when big platforms are overtaken by fascists. It's worse when the only reference to encyclopedia has been, effectively.