The Whitehouse thinks digitally altering photos of people it arrests is a "meme"?
That's just as perverted an understanding of a "meme" as their understanding of "law". Namely: the law protects but does but bind the in-group, and binds but does not protect those in the out-group. Thus the January 6 insurrectionists get pardons, and the killer of Renee Good has the automatic internal investigation cancelled.
"Meme" my ass.
It’s made to go viral. They’re signaling intent. This is where algorithmic, ad-fueled social media leads a republic.
Only if we keep repeating things like this.
People have agency and there are many people who are not led by or actively abusing social media. You don't tell a heroin addict it's not their fault, that the presence and malice of dealers made their fate inevitable.
It’s much akin to suggesting that poor people should not blame the system that keeps them poor and instead should focus on their education and getting themselves out of their current situation. Sure it’s accurate for the individual but, it’s not an actual solution to the problem at scale.
Heroin addicts quit aided by the intense and direct efforts and support of the people around them. Whether that’s hospital staff or family. And you often do tell heroin addicts it’s not their fault. You tell them addiction is a disease. That their addiction is not a moral failing.
Some people can make the change, and since social media is social, that small vanguard causes others to switch as well.
One can blame the system for keeping them poor, while also doing as much as possible to change their own position within the current system, those are not in opposition to each other! In fact, discouraging people from getting educated because of the system is its own form of oppression.
Highlighting people's own agency to make changes for themselves also highlights how the engineered manipulation of social media is not inevitable. These are complimentary things to do.
Who is doing this? Did I suggest that addressing the systemic issues with the cycle of poverty precludes individuals pursuing education? No, I said it doesn’t on its own resolve the issue of poverty as a whole.
> Only if we keep repeating things like this.
I still think the answer to this problem will not hinge on individuals choosing to interact with social media less and more intelligently. The vast majority of us know social media is manipulating and dividing the population. We all know we should use it less. We already have these discussions and have been for years and it shows to have very little actual effect on the overall situation we find ourselves in.
You are right in that it can be a yes-and type situation but my worry is that bringing personal responsibility to the forefront of the conversation mostly serves to diminish the responsibility we face as a society to reign in these monstrous (in both ways) companies that are actively destroying our social fabric in pursuit of profits in the most charitable view, or in pursuit of bringing us into a hellscape of a new world order, re Thiel et al.
This is one of the great things about BlueSky, you can make your own feeds. The bad thing about BlueSky is that the default algorithms are pretty bad (except for the simple "following" feed). But choosing your own sets of feeds, each with their own algorithms, is a great way to keep up with highly focused news and also allow discovery of new information, without as much manipulation as you'll get on the past generation of social media.
I recall, however, and this may be apocryphal, that one woman went to the stand screaming and crying and begging for mercy. This humanized her. The crowds, soured to their revelry, went home.
I am curious if her pleas were heard because those people were better than we are today, or because social media amplifies our cruelty beyond even that of our darkest modern histories.
... I don't think there was much "humanizing" going on at all.
The fact that the Bourgeois of France were growing in real power, but completely unrepresented in the formal political systems in France, was one of the major pressure points that caused the entire system to explode into Revolutionary violence.
I think you're right to point out the irony that revolutionary violence mostly affected the common man, and not the aristocracy, but the "enemies of the revolution" were nobles, clergy, and their sympathizers (perceived or otherwise), not "the bourgeoisie".
Proletarian revolutions against the Bourgeois don't really happen until there IS an urban proletariat in the first place- in pre-industrial 1789, the bourgeois and the sans-culottes were grouped together socially in the "Third Estate".
But this is all irrelevant to the article at hand
I don’t think it is. The White House describes the image as a meme because it’s designed to go viral. It’s made for the algorithms to boost to specific audiences.
Don’t think anyone would care if they photoshopped something ugly or inconvenient out of a picture.
This is signally more “look we’re traumatising people” which means they think there is an audience that wants to see that. Dark AF
Everyone involved in something like this should be sacked immediately, but I have very little hope that voters are going to punish egregious misbehavior like this as long as it's "their" side doing it.
If you had told republican voters in 2016 that within the decade, there were going to be widespread searches/arrests by federal agents without warrant or trial, unapologetic image falsification by the White House and even killings of unarmed civilian protesters: They would have gone absolutely ballistic- rightfully so.
Sadly, I disagree here. They would have qualified their reaction by asking who would be in power. If it was a GOP held white house, they'd probably rationalize it and say it's good.
Partisanship rot goes very deep on the republican side. Granted, the democrats suck, but the republicans fall in line every time without question.
I think one is true of the representatives - Democrat constituents generally fall in line without question; whereas I think the other is true of the people - Republican voters generally fall in line without question.
The rot is deep for the constituents on either side, however. There's a LOT of incentive to preserve party/ideological status quo regardless of where you land.
It’s repeating history. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... with, for example
“On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.”
This is what America voted for.
Now we come to graphic design. It used to be only smart people knew how to use photoshop to manipulate images, but now we have given any idiot the power to manipulate images with AI and this is where we are.
I would love to be able to take photos that our government posts at face value.
I find any defense of this kind of wild. These are the people in power? Even if it is a joke is this how we want the powerful treating us?
But today, we know this administration will openly lie, and double down in the face of any refutable proof. Literally since DAY ONE they tried to push a crowd size narrative that we all saw in real time was a lie.
In fact, his rise to power in the Republican Party was primarily due to his ability to demean his opponents. He’s an insult comic, and enough people were fed up that they wanted this to happen.
This is kind of like the difference between not polluting water and hoping that people will use filters.
Any lawyers in the USA getting off their assess to fight stuff like this? (Sorry if you are). There's the Good Law Project in the UK that takes up causes.