"We'll kick the Zios out." - Montreal protesters A protest against a genocide might be expected to make many appeals: For mercy, for aid, for peace. Yet the most common undercurrent throughout the October 7 anniversary protests was an appeal for more violence. 🧵 Source: Free People Power Instagram

You fucking love getting lied to. Yes, you, scrolling right now. Stop and take stock of your public square. This below is an example of the most common fare you consume on X. It follows a predictable pattern. Some anonymous account with a ridiculously high following posts a visually dramatic photograph or video. Then they provide an equally dramatic context with no sourcing, citation or deeper explanation, just the most extreme and shocking story. Sometimes the context is exaggerated to the point of absurdity, sometimes the story is completely unrelated to the visuals. These posts get millions of views, tens of thousands of likes, and thousands of shares. In the below example, a quick image reverse search of a picture — supposedly of Israelis arbitrarily stripping people nude and binding them — indicates that this is from the October 7 Massacre and these men were likely invaders and perpetrators of atrocities. No comment or community note, even if you’re lucky enough to get one, is quick enough or impactful enough to dissipate the influence of such posts. You see dozens if not hundreds of such posts each day. Chances are you probably liked or shared one of them. Chances are you have at one point you also complained about the state of mainstream media. After all, look how they have an agenda. How they withhold context from some stories, how they don’t cover others. Look how their language is biased. How they just regurgitate what authorities or peers say. How they sensationalise and engage in clickbait. What emerged in response was the idea of enhanced citizen journalism, that social media platforms like X will serve as public squares, as marketplaces of ideas. Yet every valid criticism of mainstream media practices are engaged in on X. In a supreme meta act of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect you acknowledge the error of all mainstream media and then turn to the exact same practices on social media, if not amplified a hundred fold. The marketplace of free ideas is a Western institution is predicated on the principle of truth; ideas will be debated on their merits in good faith and the best will rise to the top. Yet you opened the market to the entire world in a misguided attempt at fairness. Truth is not a universal principle, and you flooded the market with cheap goods that do not stand up to the quality and regulations of honest discourse and the pursuit of truth. You allows totalitarian countries without the free market, where the business of ideas is government-owned and all trade of truth is tightly state controlled, to cheat in your country’s market with subsidised ideas. They send their representatives to engage with you, using your system, but you never see the average citizen of their country engage with you. They’re forbidden unless approved by the state. Meanwhile they flood the market with the counterfeit ideas of thousands of bots. You engendered ideologies in your so-called academies of higher-learning where truth doesn’t matter, only the ends. You incentivised intellectual theft, content farming, and cheap products with monetisation and a lazy and addicted attention economy. The marketplace of free ideas has been turned by all these forces into a wet market of slop content. You consume the slop. You lap it up. The reality is you likely didn’t stop scrolling. You didn’t stop to read this, and if you did, you didn’t get this far down. You fucking love getting lied to. You share it. You like it. You view it. We all do. It’s not mainstream media who is the problem. Everyone is.