conformity

The Persuasive Power of Dissenting Comments

This is why news sites deleted all their comment sections. This is why they censor you on social media. This is why companies and campaigns hire content farms to bury dissent beneath a flood of approval.

They know the research shows dissenting comments reduce the persuasiveness of their propaganda, while likes and approving comments have no such persuasive power.

  • Dissenting comments are more persuasive than high numbers of likes.
  • Dissenting comments reduce the persuasiveness of news article content.
  • Comments in agreement with article content have no such persuasive impact.

Psychology Study screenshot: "They Came, They Liked, They Commented: Social Influence on Facebook News Channels." by Stephan Winter, Caroline Brückner, and Nicole Kramer; published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Due to the increasing importance of social networking sites as sources of information, news media organizations have set up Facebook channels in which they publish news stories or links to articles. This research investigated how journalistic texts are perceived in this new context and how reactions of other users change the influence of the main articles. In an online experiment (N=197), a Facebook posting of a reputable news site and the corresponding article were shown. The type of user comments and the number of likes were systematically varied. Negative comments diminished the persuasive influence of the article, while there were no strengthening effects of positive comments. When readers perceived the topic as personally relevant, comments including relevant arguments were more influential than comments with subjective opinions, which can be explained by higher levels of elaboration. However, against expectations of bandwagon perceptions, a high number of likes did not lead to conformity effects, which suggests that exemplifying comments are more influential than statistical user representations. Results are discussed with regard to effects of news media content and the mechanisms of social influence in Web 2.0.






Twitter Bans People for Saying “Men Aren’t Women”

You are not allowed to disagree with the State-enforced gender ideology. You will be removed from the public conversation. You may even get a visit from the cops. It’s a great way to manufacture fake consensus for unpopular ideas; just delete and threaten everyone who disagrees with you.

Article screenshot from The Federalist: "Twitter Permanently Bans Feminist For Writing That Men Aren't Women"

Last week, the social media giant permanently banned  Meghan Murphy, a writer based in British Columbia, for critiquing transgender ideology online. The platform repeatedly suspended her account for this then ultimately banned her last week, saying such behavior "violated [its]  rules against hateful conduct." 

At Feminist Current, Murphy writes about her ban: 

What is insane to me, though, is that while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won't allow me to state very basic facts, such as 'men aren't women'.

They have used this rule to clear out many political commentators they want silenced too. If you are not a fully brainwashed left winger, they can find a way to sweep you out of the public conversation. They have defined perfectly normal beliefs as “hate” now, and apply the rules selectively to remove whoever they want.



Dancing Mania and other social contagions

Definition: "Behavioral contagion"
Spontaneous, unsolicited and uncritical imitation of another's behaviour.

Behavioral contagion is a form of social contagion involving the spread of behavior through a group. It refers to the propensity for a person to copy a certain behavior of others who are either in the vicinity, or whom they have been exposed to. The term was originally used by Gustave Le Bon.

Dancing Mania. Medieval social phenomena.

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague) was a social phenomenon that … involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time … until they collapsed from exhaustion and injuries.

The outbreaks of dancing mania varied, and several characteristics of it have been recorded. Generally occurring in times of hardship, up to tens of thousands of people would appear to dance for hours, days, weeks, and even months.

Women have often been portrayed in modern literature as the usual participants in dancing mania, although contemporary sources suggest otherwise.  Whether the dancing was spontaneous, or an organized event, is also debated. What is certain, however, is that dancers seemed to be in a state of unconsciousness and unable to control themselves.

In his research into social phenomena, author Robert Bartholomew notes that contemporary sources record that participants often did not reside where the dancing took place. Such people would travel from place to place, and others would join them along the way. With them they brought customs and behaviour that were strange to the local people.  Bartholomew describes how dancers wore "strange, colorful attire" and "held wooden sticks".

Robert Marks, in his study of hypnotism, notes that some decorated their hair with garlands.[7]: 201  However, not all outbreaks involved foreigners, and not all were particularly calm. Bartholomew notes that some "paraded around naked" and made "obscene gestures". Some even had sexual intercourse. Others acted like animals, and jumped, hopped and leaped about.

They hardly stopped, and some danced until they broke their ribs and subsequently died. Throughout, dancers screamed, laughed, or cried, and some sang. Bartholomew also notes that observers of dancing mania were sometimes treated violently if they refused to join in. Participants demonstrated odd reactions to the color red; in A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Midelfort notes they "could not perceive the color red at all", and Bartholomew reports "it was said that dancers could not stand... the color red, often becoming violent on seeing [it]".

Imagine the spread of dysfunctional social contagions now that social media has burst onto the scene..







Big Tech Worker Reveals Corporate Rot (and Collapse of Staff Morale)

Tweet screenshot: Hazard Harrington @HazardHarringto writes: I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it's like from the inside right now.

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it's like from the inside right now.

Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in office. Pronouns stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All what you'd expect. But COVID/WFH (work from home) has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They're the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.

There's constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask "How is everyone feeling?" Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. "I'm so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!" It's toxic. When it got to me, I said "Good." and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not. I think it hurt her that I wasn't as miserable as her. She made some argument about "vulnerability". These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them. They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.

So back to morale. Everyone is demoralized. This may surprise you, since Big Tech is extremely well paid and has been able to WFH throughout the past 2 years. They've been given extra days off, extra stipends, bonuses, etc. They never had to fear being laid off. I have some sympathy, and can feel some of this myself. It's normal and natural to work with people in-person. WFH can make it easy to overwork. You take fewer breaks, often work past normal working hours. You don't feel connected to customers or celebrate success in person.

And as I mentioned, Big Tech is often the only social life for people. I fortunately never made it mine, but my company had all sorts of after-work activities. Sports leagues, game nights, different classes taught by employees. There was a rhythm and connectedness that's gone. The Great Resignation is real. Many employees are leaving for better jobs. Remote work has (so far) resulted in more job opportunities for those working in Big Tech, especially outside of Silicon Valley. And so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote.

We now have employees who have nearly 2 years of tenure who have never met another employee in person, and lives alone in some city away from where the office was. This would be fine for a normal person, but again, we're attracting the family-less urbanites scared of even meeting up with their friends at a restaurant. The churn in jobs also has the major effect of constantly dealing with the overhead of re-assinging projects from people leaving, and onboarding new people. The new employees don't get enough attention to succeed. And the employees that stay end up with a load of work dumped by the former coworkers, plus the responsibility of onboarding the new ones. There are many software engineers who've not written a single line of code in the past year.

While the Woke agitation has slowed due to the productive employees' ability to simply log off, in addition to the tiredness of the agitators, there is more and more open rebellion regarding pay and profits. "Bring your whole self to work" was the Big Tech mantra. Tell people about your cool hobbies, share your politics (if you're far left only), share your sex life. This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts.

You used to have to have the balls to knock on the CEOs office door, or schedule a meeting. Now you can fire off a nasty Slack message straight to her. People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing. It's unreal what people will write, with no recourse. If it were anything remotely RW, I'm certain they'd be immediately fired, but so long as they're sufficiently LW or minority (anything but straight white man), they can agitate, complain, do no work, and continue employment. And so the entire company has devolved. We're running on the code written in years past. No major new product initatives are being launched. Workers complain that they're understaffed and demoralized. People take constant sick days, or don't show up at all without record.

It's very easy to hide when WFH. With such a flux in employees/management and so much allowance for "mental health", it's easy to simply no show without punishment. We hired a new employee and I pinged them at 1pm to see if they'd join a meeting. They came 10 minutes later. Said they slept in because they didn't have anything to work on. It's got to be mind-boggling for someone not in software. On a given day, managers (there are several in weird matrix structure) will say things like "What can I do to support you?" "Do you have enough to work on? Too much?" It's like emotional support. And you can simply say, "Oh, I've had a hard week. Barely slept. Felt sick. Don't think I can handle much more this week." There's no real accountability to anyone. Record profits at the top, because of existing code and product-market fit cruising along, so leaders don't notice.

It's utterly surreal to watch the deterioration. To see how quickly an organization can crumble. And I'm not productive either. I'm constantly bombarded with anti-white, anti-male, woke propaganda. We've even had explicit discussions of assigning less work to URMs (under-represented minorities), because "life is really hard for them right now." This suggestion was from a lesbian white woman with cats. As productive as one person can be, you can't add value when constantly thwarted. Nobody in IT doing tickets anymore to provision things for you, large bureaucracy to gatekeep any actions (needs review by X number of committees including now DEI committees). It's hard to feel unproductive. I'm not the type who feels great about getting paid to not work, but that's essentially what I've been doing for the last year.

This problem is the worst in Big Tech, so if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon Prime, or Netflix go down, the world will probably be better off. It's not essential. I worry about this apathy spreading to companies that matter. Ones that write software for utilities.

I know this isn't just my company because I've interviewed at many other companies (Big Tech and Unicorns). Awful conduct at interviews. Demoralized employees who show up late, unprepared, or absolutely do not want to be there.

Things my coworkers spend an enormous amount of their day on:
- Coming up with a "clever" new Zoom background each day (something Harry Potter or Star Wars like children)
- Clever Slack emojis
- Reddit style responses in threads ("First!) and other low brow irony for the lulz.

I've interviewed many times wanting to leave, but every comparable company how has a "Diversity Panel" interview, which is just a matter of gatekeeping ideological purity at these companies. They ask questions like: "Why is diversity important to you?" and "What have you done to increase diversity at your company?"

In one interview, they re-asked me 3 times because they weren't satisfied that I was ideologically pure enough. I value diversity of experience, they were wanting me as a white man to apologize for my sin of being born. 

Source: https://archive.is/s8jDw