(Disclaimer: This article seems to have been posted to several communities on lemmy, so I’m going to comment this under every single one I find.)

Hmm, I’m not liking this headline. Let’s try rewriting it a bit, shall we?

Why YOU (the person writing this article) are knowingly volunteering for Trump, and how to stop trying to blame everyone else for it.

Yeah, that’s better.

Every time Trump says or posts something bizarre — whether it’s a typo, a wild conspiracy theory, or an AI-generated image of himself as the pope — social media explodes.

Led by who? The media. People like you, the author of this very article, writing articles with the explicit purpose of generating outrage so they can sell more ads. You know you are making this problem worse and you don’t care, so stop trying to blame it on everyone else.

This tactic is shockingly effective

Because you enable it, you platform it, you amplify it. If people like you would stop writing articles that amount to ‘notorious fire hose of bullshit spews even more bullshit’ it would be a whole fucking lot less effective.

Those who amplify Trump’s absurd statements into top news stories and endless scandals aren’t undermining his agenda

That’s you and journalists like you. So fucking stop it. Stop writing articles about how Trump’s presidency is Putin’s wet dream (looks like someone had the good sense to delete that one), how Trump is going to invade Canada, ‘dire warnings’ about Trump’s fraud, etc. With your current article blaming everyone but yourself for this problem the hypocrisy is finally piled high enough that I can no longer ignore it. So please, in the kindest possible terms, I would like to cordially invite you to fuck ALL the way off with your nonsense.

Since you went to the trouble of making a list, let’s go through your points one by one, shall we?

1. Understand his strategy … By flooding the public with scandal after scandal, lie after lie, they create confusion, fatigue, and a sense of helplessness.

And you would think the people who work for media, who are ostensibly the most media-liteate among us, would have recognized their own prominent place in it. It’s not ‘them’ flooding the world with their scandals and lies, it’s YOU. You are creating in articles like the above (not to mention this one) the helplessness that you purport to be working against.

2. Be ruthlessly selective with your attention … Skip outrage bait.

Like the 3 articles I mentioned above that you wrote?

3. Be mindful what you share … Ask yourself before you share: Is this helping people understand, organize, or act

Practice what you fucking preach.

4. Focus on meaningful action … Take a moment to honestly compare how much time you’ve spent absorbed in Trump scandals with the time you’ve put into meaningful efforts or thoughtful planning to help protect democracy.

And how much time have you spent on articles like the above ginning up exactly the sort of outrage that you now purport to be against? How much meaningful effort and thoughtful planning have you contributed to this? If this article is your best example I’m gonna go ahead and guess basically none.

5. Keep the faith … Making us feel afraid and helpless is a key goal of authoritarian confusion tactics.

And, apparently, a key goal of media shills like you who enable it.

6. Help others tune out the noise … When you see outrage bait spreading online, speak up.

Here the fuck I am, speaking up.

and why it’s so important to stay focused on what actually matters: useful, actionable information.

None of which is in this article. Instead what we find is victim-blaming, projection, and a frankly shocking lack of self-awareness that you are the problem, not the solution. Nobody on social media is doing original reporting here, they’re all linking articles written by people like you, and blaming the victim is the oldest fucking trick in the book to try to shift the blame from yourself: ‘If only you would all recycle harder (or, what seems to be your personal favorite, stop eating meat) we wouldn’t have climate change,’ ‘If only you would all put down your phones we wouldn’t have an epidemic of loneliness’, ‘If only you would all vote the way I think you should we would live in a magical happy place where nothing ever goes wrong.’

All bullshit, all the time. But that’s okay, I have a few of my own:

If only the media would stop being a willing mouthpiece for fascism.

If only the media would stop chasing ad revenue and start actually trying to inform the populace with unbiased, non-sensational truth about what’s actually going on.

If only the media would stop blasting every fucking word Trump and his bullshit-factory crank out.

If only people like you would stop telling us everything is our fault and take some fucking responsibility for your not-insignificant part in this.

Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don’t need and didn’t even want until the ad sold us on it? It’s fucking wild.

Indeed, although anyone who says they knew what shape this would take 40 years ago was either a liar or a time traveler, I’ve been watching it go to shit for my entire life. I too tried voting blue for 30 years only to watch them unwind and fall apart when the chips were down. Now I favor rather more extreme measures, but most Americans are like ‘waah, I keep choosing the lesser evil, why do we keep getting evil?!’

Aside from this being a little fucking melodramatic and defeatist, the thing that really bothers me is the implicit assumption that if only we’d all just vote blue no matter who we wouldn’t have this problem, like the Democratic Party hasn’t been kowtowing to and enabling those same oligarchs to undermine our democracy. It’s like they’re standing in the rubble of a bombing and saying, ‘This is happening because you chose the short fuse on the bomb, if only you had chosen the long fuse we wouldn’t have noticed this happening quite so quickly wouldn’t be having this problem!’

Don’t get me wrong, boom tomorrow is definitely better than boom today, but it’s important to not forget that there was never not going to be a boom.

They aren’t saying do nothing, they’re saying do something more useful than voting.

You are going crazy. I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn’t a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it’s probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.

I only thought of it because I bought a little stand for my phone a couple years ago and it has one, but fair enough!

That looks really nice and elegantly simple. If I could make a suggestion though, you might want to raise the phone cradle up a bit and put a slot in the bottom so it can charge while on the stand.

‘Most millennials aren’t buying enough of our shit and that’s a HUGE PROBLEM that all of you definitely care about!’

That’s some pretty useful advice in the comments tho. But also I’m 52 years old and have literally never used fabric softener in my life and have no idea what it’s supposed to be for other than making companies like Proctor & Gamble even more money.

Also, another handy tip: ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ is bullshit, unless you have really thick or really oily hair and don’t wash regularly, you don’t need to wash it twice, the shampoo company just wants you to buy more. Same with fill marks in a washing machine, unless you’re doing a huge load there’s no reason to fill it all the way up.

Yeah, I got a 7-day ban for ‘encouraging violence’, when all I said was that Luigi didn’t deserve to go to jail for what he did. I appealed, my account was restored, but not before being (as of now, I literally just noticed this) permanently-banned for ‘multiple, repeated violations of Reddit’s Content Policy on your other account(s).’ I have had only one account on Reddit for 14 years, I don’t even make throwaways, so it seems like they’re really scraping for excuses. What’s hilarious is that my account was reinstated 3 hours ago from the appeal for teh temp-ban, but the perma-ban came 11 hours ago, so they perma-banned me then lifted the temp-ban. Thanks, guys. :P I’m going to appeal it just to see what their response is, but fuck 'em.