The ad shows Maine Gov. Janet Mills giving little kids syringes with hormones. They couldn’t use real video because that never happened.
Republicans are attacking Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) – who is running for the U.S. Senate – with a fake artificial intelligence (AI)-generated video of her giving a boy “a no-parent-permission-required estrogen kit.”
Mills has been a strong supporter of transgender rights this past year, refusing to bow to pressure from the president to ban trans kids from participating in school sports.
But instead of just criticizing her for her actual record of support for trans people, Republicans have decided to use deepfake videos.
Go the other way and make positive memes for the Dems, for fucks sake. Flood the Internet with good shit
Spreading unfocused positivity doesn’t succeed nearly as much as picking at someone’s specific anger or insecurity and then validating it.
One makes people sigh and roll their eyes at inspirational quotes and the general feeling of being “shamed” by messaging that shows other people doing good things and for the insecure and angry, that just feels like being told “Why can’t you be better?”
Meanwhile if you’re is stressed and uneducated and hopeless feeling, being told that there is a specific group or segment of the population around you who is facilitating all your misery, well that’s a call to action. That’s a tangible thing you can get mad at and rage against and blame for your woes and it requires no actual work to get that feeling of satisfaction.
It’s a survival response that companies and political entities have learned how to exploit and there’s no quick answer for it. It may never be solved.
Maybe if all shifted our informational/media attention more towards understanding our own limitations and failings in our emotional/cognitive ability, we could start broadly pushing the needle towards systems that protect us from ourselves, but I strongly feel like we’re going to slide backwards a good long ways before we start making any forward progress again. This is the long-arc of time, and part of coming to terms with the injustice is understanding we won’t see that better tomorrow. We can work towards it and try to set it up for our descendants, but the best we can hope for in the moment is finding a little peace and comfort in our personal lives.
You are right and I agree. The problem here is that people just don’t give a shit about what happens in the future.
I have two conservatives in my life. One of them is a childhood friend, the other is my boss. I argue with both of them regularly, and they’ve both said the same thing to me- “we’ll be dead before it matters” roughly. The first has two kids and the second says he wants kids. I just don’t get it.
Maybe this is why times of uncertainty and fear of the future lead to authoritarianism, it makes people not care. If you don’t care, you aren’t curious, you’re just grinding through the days to see if “something happens” and cannot live in the present because you’re stuck worried about the future and longing for the past.
The truth is less viral. If it doesn’t make people upset and angry, they don’t rage-share it or repost it.