For legal reasons, this is a joke lol
As someone who plays the musical instrument called “trumpet”, I ask- no, I beg of you, PLEASE do not use my musical instrument to describe fascists.
Huh I didn’t even think of that lol, got any good alternatives for future memes?
Personally I always go with either “Trump-supporter” or “Fascist”, I think giving them a silly name ultimately only serves to dehumanize which doesnt help unless your goal is violence.
i will admit that calling them “weirdos” feels very cathartic for me, but tbh I think of most of the ones who aren’t in power as just being really brainwashed, so it feels a little sad to resort to name calling. better to just do what you can to deprogram or cut ties and move on. sorry if that makes me kind of a stick in the mud for memes 😅
MAGAT works better anyway since it sounds like maggot, and maggots are gross just like MAGATs.
I’m not joking, you should do this. Free their I’ll minds from the poison.
Heh I may or may not have peeled off one “certain Trump vote” to a “Fuck it, not voting for anyone” so far
I’ve thought about rerouting their Internet through my network via VPN and pin my own HTTPS cert to their devices so I can alter Faux News “articles” on the fly with a ChatGPT integration maybe. Wouldn’t be able to alter videos, but might be able to slow them down to dialup speeds so they just get frustrated with it and just lean more on the written stuff
I wish there was an easy way to do this for radio, best I can think of getting some AM transmitters and overriding the stations. But that would be annoying and the AM ones are hard to find.
Seriously AM talk radio is fucken cancer and needs to be fucking nuked from orbit. Its where my grandmother gets her stupidest ideas from and then I have to explain that no I am not doing that stupidly complex thing so you can have a 5 percent better car antenna.
A more powerful local transmission may be considered jamming. I’m not sure, so look up relevant law beforehand.
Do one better: Get control of their internet network access and start straight DNS black-holing whole swaths of misinformation on the internet. Tell them you don’t know what’s wrong and to complain to the service provider.
You can do this easily with a Pi-Hole under the guise of it being an “ad blocker,” and slowly, over time, making more sites unresponsive.
Make a Pi-Hole group for your own devices that doesn’t have this blocking, so when they question you, you can show them your device and be like “it works for me.”
It’s kind of the modern equivalent of using parental controls to block FOX News.
For legal reasons, this is also a joke, because “now that’s what I call gaslighting.”
Heh, I’ll do ya one better, I already replied with this to someone else in the thread, but I’m currently thinking about rerouting their Internet through my network via VPN and pinning my own HTTPS cert to their devices so I can alter Faux News “articles” on the fly with a ChatGPT integration maybe. Wouldn’t be able to alter videos, but might be able to slow them down to dialup speeds so they just get frustrated with it and just lean more on the written stuff
I figure this would be more effective than straight blocking
True, because they can still access it, but it’s garbled and/or confusing. Interesting idea.
so they just get frustrated with it and just lean more on the written stuff
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink it. In my experience, most average people just don’t like reading.
True, but I know them very well so my approach is tailored to them, they generally do read “articles” but will get distracted by those stupid auto-play videos and will start watching a couple of those. If they couldn’t for whatever reason I know they’ll just go back to whatever article they were reading
Won’t work. The recommendation algorithms have been designed to maximize engagement. Anger is the most effective way to engage people, so they will always end up recommending far-right shit again.
It’s definitely annoying having to constantly correct “drift”, but at the same time it’s SO MUCH less mental load than the “traditional ways” of deprogramming. I’m hopeful that (eventually) with good precision filter keywords and blocked profiles they’ll start to engage with more sensible content more and the algo will track from there
My Boomer parents never used social media to begin with (unless forwarded chain emails count?). I did manage to get them to ditch cable TV and mindlessly vegetating on Fox News all day, but they still (unfathomably) prefer OTA TV to streaming so they’re still in Sinclair’s thrall. IDK what else to do at this point.
Like old school antenna? Do they have one of those big roof top antennas? If so, you might be able to splice the line somewhere inconvenient and insert something that’ll cause just enough interference to make it annoying over the better alternatives like streaming.
Gotta be careful though, OTA tv is their jam unlike all the other “high tech new fangled wizardry”
