I think it's far harder to gain left wing
votes based on emotions than right wing ones. Right wing groups can use far more tribalist sentiment and fear. It's Britain First vs Jeremy 4 PM stuff on Facebook. They both cherry pick information for the sake of emotion instead of rationality, but Britain First are going "You should be scared about this" rather than "You should think this man is great" - people are going to sit up and take notice of anything that may put them in danger or makes them angry. Neither use logic in their arguments, but what's to be done?
All the recent censorship-of-speech and public-shaming stuff is scary, but I don't really see that as a left-right issue - look how offended right wing people get about a stupid left wing idea. Christian Voice and the Jerry Springer stuff aren't really different to someone wanting to ban Germaine Greer from a university. Both should be ridiculed rather than it becomming yet another partisan thing.
I really blame social media for most of this shit - you only see one side of a conversation, it's easy to get an online mob together of people who think the same way as you, and it seems people will abuse any power they are given. Saw social media blamed for a rise in mental health issues, and it really doesn't surprise me. It can be toxic for debate.
In terms of b3ta, I suspect there is safety in obsfucation. We tend to use avatars (in your case, good look to anyone searching "tits" to try and find dirt on you), and because people have to sign up before they can call you a cunt, are less likely to form a mob around it - it's not instant pleasure for them, research would be required to trace someone (since no one ever bothers to even do a reverse image search before sharing an angry meme, that's unlikely), and its hard to do any virtue signalling on a threaded messageboard when comments are seen in context.
It's the data that's saved by the likes of Facebook that scares me far more - that's the stuff that's going to be scraped and used to profile you in future. I've seen plenty of people click 'like' on quite innocent sounding posts by far right groups - "here's a stock picture of a poppy - share if you don't hate our veterans" etc.
By cherry picking from so much data on our internet history, anyone can be made out to be anything.
(Reading a book at the moment called Future Crimes on how our internet data is stored - fucking terrifying)
(
monkeon schmonkeon, Sat 1 Oct 2016, 10:59,
Reply)
I've never considered that people on here might be virtue signalling
What a terrible thought
(, Sat 1 Oct 2016, 11:44, Reply)