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.
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?
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/
“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.
Don’t care downvote
