Education Is Key to Fighting Disinformation on Social Media - The New York Times:

These groups can be broadly defined as people who have a deep distrust of authority and traditional sources of information such as governments, scientists, doctors or bankers. This distrust is frequently rooted in a sense of feeling betrayed or harmed by those authorities. There could be completely legitimate reasons — whether personal, social or political — for that sense of betrayal, but it often leads them online to seek alternative viewpoints outside the mainstream discourse. In doing so, they find communities that reflect and reinforce their feelings of skepticism and distrust.

This is spot on. Growing up poor and without a formal education doesn’t make you dumb. It does, however, make you more vulnerable to disinformation. Not just because you’re uneducated, though, it’s also because growing up poor, you have a first-hand account of how rigged the system is against you. Where an educated, upper-middle-class person learns the theory of systemic oppression, a person of the lower classes lives it. That experience almost works against them.

When I was a teenager, maybe even into my early twenties, I would read Info Wars. Before I knew what liberal and conservative meant, I knew certain aspects of society were unjust. I knew what the cops were doing to me and my friends was wrong. Without a proper education, I listened to the first person who acknowledged these injustices. I got lucky growing up without modern social media. There wasn’t a deep rabbit hole to fall into. We didn’t have dopamine machines fine-tuning content to our worst neurosis.

Now, at 43, with age and self-education on my side, I have better tools to analyze the material conditions of my world. But my sense of justice has always remained.

This epidemic of young boys and men who understand enough about the world to know it’s unjust but are not educated enough to know who to listen to is, in no small part, a problem with neoliberalism. Upper-middle-class people with wide-reaching influence on the web have spent the last decade telling poor people that there’s nothing wrong with the system, the economy is fine, etc.

We turned our backs on these people. Of course, bad actors were there, willing to take them captive.

This is what makes the horseshoe theory complete bullshit. It derives from a false dichotomy. Liberal vs. Conservative is just a country-wide family fued over land and power between the bourgeoisie. What we are witnessing is not ideologies going so far left it ends up on the right. It’s people understanding that the system is unfixable and the divide comes from who we choose to blame for it. Everyone else, liberal and conservative alike, are champions of the status quo, where the divide comes from who gets to rule over it all.

It’s not left and right, it’s up and down.