The only thing you have to fear.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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    1. Don’t use Tiktok (and other low quality social media like Twitter) and encourage people you know to do the same. Suggest alternatives like federated sites, and help people navigate it if you can.

    2. Firmly correct disinformation when you see it. If you have a topic of interest you find yourself repeatedly addressing, keep a short copy/paste response with easily digestible sources to make the process quick and painless.

    3. Engage as little as possible with disinformation, since any kind of engagement is exactly what they’re looking for. When you stumble upon it, state a brief sourced correction and quickly leave. If someone beat you to it, simply leave and avoid in the future.

    4. Teach your friends and family about the dangers of misinformation, and the importance of vetting sources. Peer reviewed journal = great. Random youtuber/tiktoker = needs sources to confirm validity.

    5. Try to be as polite as possible when addressing disinformation because aggression can cause people to dig their heels in and push them further into the false narrative.

    6. Learn terms to describe the spread of disinformation that are easy for people to grasp. Learning and teaching others about things like “good/bad faith arguments” so you can spot and effectively counter trolls, recognizing “irony poisoning” that is a driving force behind the normalization of extremist views, and understanding how “woke” actually means “tolerant and respectful of the differences between human beings” can all help people to see what’s happening and protect against disinformation.

    7. If you’re motivated enough, start your own publication that provides accurate, well sourced information on your topics of interest, or join an already established publication as a freelance contributor.

    8. Don’t give up. Don’t let anyone convince you that the fight is already over and that we’re doomed to live out 1984. The real fight hasn’t even begun, because so many people are too caught up in their own stressful lives to realize there’s a full blown culture war going on here. Once more people open their eyes to it, sanity will prevail. These points here are exactly how you can begin opening people’s eyes.




  • Renting isn’t the greatest decision, either. You’re throwing money at a landlord and gaining zero equity. People often do it because it’s that or homelessness. These systems are in place to take advantage of people who aren’t the best decision makers. Just because they can be taken advantage of… should they be? Or should we be better than this and revamp how we house people so that it isn’t a massive scam with the opportunity for extra side scams like we see here?

    If the landlord wasn’t a massive dick, they both could have benefited from this situation. She’d have the renovated bathroom she wanted, and the landlord knew his property was being taken care of without even needing to lift a finger. Instead he got greedy, and rather than blame the greedy jerk people want to jump on the “stupid” victim. Except it’s not her fault her landlord was a prick.




  • Your advice isn’t helpful for people who don’t have the means to own their own home. Being trusting or naive isn’t something that should be shamed. There’s a way to educate people with kindness and compassion. People aren’t born knowing how to best handle the legal end of a renovation. But go on and call her stupid some more, that’ll help the onlookers. You and I and everyone in this comments section will be smart and secure with the claws we have dug into the insides of the pretty housing bubble. Perhaps if we bicker even more, the problem will disappear completely.



  • Everyone is so busy insulting the tenant doing the upgrades when it’s the landlord who behaved badly. If all we do is collectively blame victims when they get taken advantage of, society will crumble. This woman wasn’t stupid, she just didn’t have her guard up in preparation for the massive asshole who had power over her. There’s a difference.

    When you are trusting, you’re called stupid. When you trust no one, you’re called unreasonably cynical. They’re two sides of the same victim blaming coin. Start blaming the actual problem: predators.







  • Your assessment seems spot on to me. I’m connecting some projected dots to late stage capitalism. Perhaps the AIs will trickle down and such if we hold off on regulations.

    Of course it’s possible for the government to impose regulations without sticking their face in and motorboating the AI’s contents. Google, Microsoft et al. would love to prevent this from happening because they actually do have their faces in there.