Abso fecking lutely
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I think it’s a vicious circle and this has nothing to do with inequality or poverty. Malnutrition is rife in our societies whether we are rich or poor. Senior decision makers in industry, in politics sit in meetings, constipated, headachy, bad tempered, tired, with IBS, hung-over, stressed, brain-fogged and as a result they make bad, if not appalling decisions. They have lost all connection / grounding with themselves, their own bodies, their fellow humans because of the chemicals in their brains and bodies that are destroying the connections of empathy, rapport and control. They are addicted to sugar / caffeine / gluten and in turn these become their nutrition of choice so they support the industries that supply these products and lies are told about these products and yet more of these products are made and sold, not “just” to the poor but just as much to the people who run our world. And they have no idea just how sick they are.
I find the way the US is unravelling rather spookily. The American dream was in full flight when I was kid. My existence, albeit within a loving, caring and reasonably financially secure family contrasted badly with life on the Donna Reed show. I think life for many Americans has deteriorated steadily since those heady days of the sixties. Today, IMO, based on working for a US MNC for 25 years and my own travels there (though I haven’t been there in six years) if you have a $200K plus salary and a couple of million in assets it’s still a great place to live. Otherwise it’s shit.
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You may be right John - except that the research reported in the book ‘The Spirit Level’ (I don’t have it to hand but can get the details if you’re interested) found that the more unequal a society, the less happy everybody tends to be - even the rich.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect for those of us with family and friends in the UK, though, is that the brexit decision, and subsequent election of the Johnson/Cummings government, was in reality a choice of the American model over the European Social Model…
The prospective UK-US trade deal ‘is not really about importing more American products. It’s about importing the American economic and regulatory model’.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/we-must-defeat-us-trade-deal/
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Don’t disagree.
Recently started re-reading Baudrillard’s America (which I’m sure you’re well-familiar with). Anyhow, what struck me was that it had become a historical document, The nihilistic, consumer driven inter-coastal America of the late C20th that Baudrillard described as dystopian plentitude has become a sort of Depression era wasteland.
I also intuit that many Brexiteers have a sneaking regard for this obsolete vision of America whilst simultaneously retaining spurious notions of British (imperial) cultural superiority.
However as long as the pound retains some reasonable value against the euro, I’ll happily watch the rest of the you know what show go down the pan
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Hmmm… Maybe we need to change the thread title to 'have the States and the UK gone mad…
The claim that there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together” regardless of who is in government… was believed by 42% of 25- to 34-year-olds.
I blame universal suffrage myself. We’re lions led by donkeys, to steal a phrase.
I agree with all of that, but full marks for ‘intuit’. I had to Google to confirm it really is a verb, to be convinced. 
But then, Google is American, isn’t it. 
Thanks.
Wish I could reply by writing that I intuit Google is American, but I know it is, so I can’t…
The thread title intrigued me as I have just read a piece from a game designer about QAnon(sense).
Of course it’s possible to look at it from a different angle:
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Interesting article Sam. Our never ending urge to belong.
It mentioned that it is gaining ground among Brexit supporters, say no more.
However, I really did not know that The Illuminati were paedophiles.
Interesting review of new analysis - though disappointingly it doesn’t really come to much of an explanation.
The most interesting bits are (as always) the data sets…
A 2019 study by researchers at Princeton and New York University showed that Facebook users over the age of 65 were as much as seven times more likely to share fake-news stories and that held true with QAnon.
This is far from a US-only phenomenon. Guardian research in the UK from the end of last year, before Facebook shut down tens of thousands of accounts, revealed a sharp rise in the use of QAnon terms among “an unlikely coalition of spirituality and wellness groups, vigilante ‘paedophile hunter’ networks, pre-existing conspiracy forums, local news pages, pro-Brexit campaigners and the far right”. Meanwhile a survey for Hope Not Hate, which monitors extremism, found that … a quarter (25%) agreed that “ secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites” and a similar proportion (26%) subscribed to the QAnon view that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media and other powerful positions” were secretly engaged in child trafficking and abuse.
Far be it from me to note the link here between people ‘over the age of 65’, ‘pro-Brexit campaigners and the far right’, and conspiracy-gullibility.
Is the real explanation simply demography?.. or senility?
I’d like to just put this into context, please. The data was collected during the 2016 presidential election in the states, so the conclusion arises from data during a specific event, and I think it’s important to mention. Here’s the abstract from the January 2019 research article “Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook” published in Science Advances, which reports on the study.:
“So-called “fake news” has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.”
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I suspect that’s because they were retired and had SFA else to do?
That could well be a factor (though might have been adjusted for - it depends how the data was collected).
However, there is a co-occurence of 3 phenomena here and in many other studies that in my view points to another explanation:
- susceptability to fake news and conspiracy theories
- right-wing political leanings - voting conservative, and
- age - at least over retirement age
Analysis after the last UK election found that although it was a big win for the Tories, among people earning less than £100k a year Labour won easily in every age group under 65. If retirees hadn’t voted, it would have been a thumping Labour majority - yes, even with the media-assasinated Corbyn as leader. This is one example of a very well researched phenomenon - seen for example in the brexit vote: younger people were not taken in by the ‘leave’ lies - the elderly were, and generally speaking, the older the more - what? - senile? (Just joking!)
In the group of our retired professional friends we all changed our vote to Lib Dem.
We could see BoJo for what he was worth, ie.nothing.
I guess another factor, although I’m not sure how much, is that at this point Facebook is less cool to the under 40s than a Daniel O’Donnell and Chris de Burgh duet of Jerusalem. The #deletefacebook movement that has sprung up over the last few years due to its unethical practices has been very much led by the generation who were the early adopters, those who are around Zuckerberg’s age, some of who were in early enough to remember when you had to have a .edu email address to get access because it was strictly targeted at university students.
No one I know under 30 would ever use their Facebook account if they have one at all, and now tiktok has theoretically given an alternative they’re dumping Facebook owned Instagram too, the influencer marketing money is all going from Instagram to TikTok showing that that’s perhaps what business feels as the next dominant platform, and we’ve all seen the concerns with WhatsApp grow too. But the core Facebook platform I would say is definitely 50+ at this point, which is not to say that only 50+’s have an account, but rather that the active accounts, those spending a chunk of every day on there reading and engaging will be. I suspect the average age of account owner will be considerably lower, but will be creeping upwards as younger users stop procrastinating and finally get around to deleting the little to never used accounts they’ve been holding on to due to FOMO or historical emotional reasons.
But we can definitely see through the 100 odd Facebook pages with a combined near billion followers that i have access to as a byproduct of my job (we don’t have any involvement in content but rather just monitor from a legal compliance angle) that at this point there is zero point spending any effort on Facebook, and certainly no additional money, if your target audience is under 40 as they’re just not there anymore. We actually were involved with a whole web series (short form TV drama) with Facebook Watch and the primary reason Facebook did it (paid for it, outbidding a number of other huge names) was because it was aimed at 15-30 year olds and the idea was to use insta and WhatsApp to promote the show and draw them back to Facebook, which it did but unfortunately for Facebook they didn’t stay, they just watched our daily 15 minute episode then immediately left.
None of which directly answers the point but it is (I think) interesting to look at this in the wider context of platform demographics.
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It is interesting - and your analysis is certainly consistent with my experience. Again, a lot depends on how they collected the data - if the ‘7-times more likely to share fake news’ figure is just a function of 7-times more likely to share anything, it is obviously less meaningful than if it is calculated as a proportion of their sharing. I assumed an adjustment had been made for this, it’s so obvious (although I know you can’t count on it - this kind of sociological survey data is fraught with very obvious problems).
Also, there are lots of other data sources that indicate the elderly are indeed more gullible.
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Very interesting Kirstea.
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