How can we make it uncool to be awful again?
(I'm thinking specifically of the US, though it's sounding like the UK, Russia, and Israel could use any solutions we might come up with.)
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@woozle I actually have some thoughts on this, based on how the furry community on Livejournal fended off attacks from trollfarms back in the 2000s.
One of our most successful strategies was crashing straight through our detractors' stereotypes of us. These people stick together in part because they've been lied to so much about what *we're* like. But they're SHIT at building their own empathetic communities and we bled quite a few folks off 'em on LJ by giving them our "better offer!"
@woozle I do have a whole lot of skepticism about whether our approach could really *scale* -- Encyclopedia Dramatica and Portal of Evil had some pretty heavy hitters and a Trolls From Olgino-grade grasp of gaslighting techniques, but they were never funded by ACTUAL KREMLIN MONEY. 🙀
And yet... I've been predicting since 2014 that the MAGAs would fall to infighting just like the trollfarms, and for exactly the same pathological reasons, and they've done nothing but prove me right so far... 🤔