pushing people towards specific ideas using social media

I've been incredibly concerned about this for more than a decade. Watching r/the_donald in action was incredible and validated all of that fear.

And it's still happening. On all social media, including here.

Certain narratives are pushed hard, and it's effective. Some of it is fully genuine. Some of it is/was seeded artificially and picked up some genuine steam, and is still being reinforced. The stuff that's fully artificial seems to be dropped fairly quickly most of the time these days.

After the artificial narrative picks up and gets genuine sentiment mixed with it, it becomes hard to tell the difference. If you can mix it in with existing emotions, like anger that we're in this situation, and add in some seeds of truth it works even better.

Propaganda works. On all of us. And just by being here, we're being exposed. But I'm afraid to leave, too. The more real people leave the easier it is to manipulate the remainder.

It's just all so easy and effective and actually happening. And the alarm bells about it aren't loud enough.