This is a great example of the importance of teaching people critical thinking skills.
If you stop to analyze what was written in this sensationalized post rather than acting on your emotions, the first question that should come into mind is “who stopped them?”. There are no checkpoints between Oregon and California where cars are turned away from crossing state lines due to emissions. In fact, that would probably violate federal free travel laws which would supercede any stupid law like that.
Next, consider the source. Is this person trustworthy? Did they provide ample citations to reputable journalistic outlets that verified the factuality of the claims? If not, they may be trying to decide you with falsehoods or have an ulterior motive for misrepresenting the facts. At best they are repeating claims that they’ve heard from others and anything they report on should be taken with a grain of salt.
This post doesn’t hold up to the slightest amount of scrutiny, but people get fooled every day by crap like this. My advice is that if you hear something that sounds outrageous or too good to be true, stop and think carefully about it for a few minutes, or maybe just wait for another source to report it. Saves you a lot of stress and protects you from endlessly doomscrolling.
A friend of mine posted something on Facebook (reposted from a local list in Arizona) claiming that two people were knocking on doors and beating up people, and one woman was in the hospital as a result. Pictures of the perpetrators and everything.
Something felt off, so I did a quick search on their names. And I found an article from some city in Texas where the same rumor had been circulating about that area. The article clarified that the two people had committed some crimes several years ago and were caught, tried, and convicted already.
So someone took one of these, changed the name of the area, and posted it to the local list. Why do people do this? A form of stochastic terrorism maybe?
Edit - I can’t find the post (I think my friend deleted it), but I did still have a tab open with the article about it.
I assume the people in the picture were “melanin enriched”? There you have your answer.
It’s a shame that you can’t know when seeing such posts if the person resharing it has good intentions or not. “Don’t open your door for strangers” is often good advice after all.
I have noticed this as well. Back during the early facebook years, a “news” outlet would just generate content by posting stories like “Greenville ranked as the city with highest crime rate” every week or so.
Everybody on my facebook feed would go crazy saying things like “I always knew that town was dangerous, but to hear it outranks New York? TERRIFYING!”
Only issue is that this outlet would have 50 different URLs for the article, all giving a city in a different state (always an immigrant heavy suburb) and those articles would be appear around facebook and nobody would know the wiser.
It costs almost nothing for them to rewrite the world and your perspective about it. The granularity they are now capable of should give us pause.
Interesting. This one didn’t include a link to an article, just fear mongering.
The person that posted it deleted it after my comment, I think. I’ll check.
Where I live I mostly see this done to support the narrative that immigrants are bad, that you can’t trust traditional media, and that you should be voting for the local fascist party.
Afaik the place names and date are not changed here, I suspect because that would make the perpetrators criminally liable. Instead they work by omission: take a many years old crime, don’t mention the date but instead post it on facebook as if it only recently happened, in that post question why the media isn’t mentioning this event or how the non-fascist politicians could let things get this much out of control, and then boost the post with help from others in the telegram group so that it reaches a wider audience.
Additionally, Washington, Oregon, California, and BC (this one has to have some sort of international limitations) have a climate pact with eachother to adopt emission and climate policies set by the other states/province.
Out of all the states that CA would have emissions issues with, OR would not be one of them.
“who stopped them?”. There are no checkpoints between Oregon and California
… actually, there are checkpoints along every major roadway into California that do check incoming vehicles, mostly to find and prevent invasive species from entering the state and affecting the agricultural industry, and more broadly to protect the environmental systems in California. There have, in fact, been legal challenges against these checkpoints for violating travel laws, but the checkpoints have remained. They’ve also been used to seize non-agricultural items like weed, weapons smuggling, etc. so emissions standards checking isn’t completely out of the realm.
Obviously, she’s lying and she doesn’t know any of this either anyway. But there are checkpoints to enter California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_Stations
I go through one all the time there has not been anyone there stopping people for years now
I can’t speak for all of them, but the I5 border station near the Oregon border hasn’t even been manned in several years. This gal is so full of shit.
The station on Highway 97 has someone there, they’ve always just waved me through and said “have a nice day” i think they stop and inspect the agricultural trucks that go through there, tho.
Why bother protecting your agriculture with sensible checks when their is profit to make and they are just getting in the way, right?
Yeah, you’re right, but you also conveniently cut out the second half of my sentence where I specifically mentioned being turned away for emissions. Context matters.
As long as a car is registered and insured they have the right to drive in any state
The firetrucks were allowed through but Haitian immigrants ate them!
You expect too much from these people, and an increasing share of them aren’t genuine people at all.
The firetrucks were allowed through but Haitian immigrants ate them!
That sounds reasonable and matches what the Big Red Squid told me on TV after last nights meth binge.
Teaching critical thinking skills it not a solution. People are not getting fooled, they want to believe it, it fills an emotional need.
Neo-liberal solutions to societal issues focusing on individuals has been a complete disaster. It is basically victim blaming and doesn’t actually scale in many circumstances.
Eg. High house prices; Victims fault for not working harder and saving more. Neo-liberal solution: Work longer, spend way less. Outcome at scale: Economy crashes due to low spending.
I agree with the rest, but
Teaching critical thinking skills it not a solution. People are not getting fooled, they want to believe it, it fills an emotional need.
Yes. Properly taught critical thinking overrides the emotional thinking. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t anymore then animals.
That’s the thing, people don’t want to. Critical thinking for one it takes more physical energy, which is a impediment. People want to belong as it can be very difficult to thrive being excluded, so there can be an advantage to just go along with the dominate narrative. Hence why we are getting a onslaught of propaganda like this twitter post.
This is going into circular logic territory.
But you see I want it to be true therefore it is
Sometimes I wonder how much better the world could be if I had the power to snap my fingers and everybody on the planet knows that confirmation bias exists and it’s a big deal.
It’s not like there’s a state border check for vehicle emissions. You can visit California in a non-California car without an emissions check. Joy’s claim doesn’t make sense even before fact checking.
There is a border check entering CA but they only ask about fruits and vegetables.
Wow it’s true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_Stations
I don’t think any other US state has checkpoints. This is a surprise to me.
California grows like 40% of the vegetables for the entire country. So they’re very protective of their agriculture.
There are. Especially for commercial vehicles:
A lot of states have checkpoints for vehicles towing boats. Need to check for invasive water creatures.
Kentucky has them sometimes for horse papers
I choose to hold two images of this in my head and they’re both equally real, reality be damned.
They’re looking for horse rolling papers and they’re going to the trailer and asking each horse to show their papers as the driver is told to stand back and let them work.
Florida has a checkpoint for plants and possible invasive species, definitely not for firetrucks helping people though.
Bugs trying to get in to Florida?
Florida has one of the best competitive scenes in the western hemisphere.
Unlike California, Florida’s agriculture checkpoint only stops commercial vehicles.
Sounds like it’s basically the same as CA then.
It’s the only other one. But Florida only has commercial vehicles pull in
And that’s rarely enforced, at least around here.
Imagine my surprise learning about them by pulling up to one. I don’t think it was even near the CA/OR, but like 50 miles into Cali on the interstate. All of a sudden I see an officer flagging me at a little booth, I figured it was an emergency ahead or maybe I ended up on a toll road? The first thing he says to me was something along the lines of ‘Got any fruit or vegetables in the vehicle?’ And I just respond ‘I’m sorry, what?’ He must get that a lot, he pretty much waved me through as he was explaining.
I brought a prepackaged fruit cup my next trip just to see what would happen but I ended up doing the coastal route and never got stopped going that way.
They’ve been a thing as long as I can remember
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It’s meant to sow discord, not be fact checked or taken seriously by critically-minded people. It’s meant to rile up the MAGA’s.
Fascist agitprop
Welcome to modern society where facts don’t matter and all feelings are made up.
Made up feelings are facts now
It makes sense to people who have never left their hometown, like most of her audience.
But dumbasses will eat that shit up
Too late. It’s already become true, and another example of wokeness for your racist uncle to bang on about.
This is exactly why so many things just feel hopeless to me. The worst people have caught on to, and the parrots don’t even realize, that you can just say literally anything and the occupants of your echo chamber will believe it immediately and then refuse to believe whatever reality actually is if it is presented to them by literally any other “outsider.”
Hell even someone of the “in-group” who is not substantial enough will be outed as an “other” if they dare go against the initial message.
The knock-on effects of this also concern me. Largely, the only effective way I’ve seen to battle disinformation is to retreat to smaller spaces. The intensity and engagement driven content loop on all the major platforms just fuels the fire. Ultimately, to achieve a better admin:user ratio where the admins aren’t idiots. While I wax nostalgic about my former BBS days, it feels like a giant step backwards to that. The quality on content is there and signal:noise ratio is sublime, but the amount of information, level of discourse, and widespread geographic socialization, isn’t.
Since the election, I’ve retreated from most news sources and reddit. I kind of realized that more or less every headline was either a lie, clickbait, or blowing up a story that largely doesn’t matter. I honestly haven’t felt more relaxed in years.
Fucking Californian wokies! They made fire gay!
They don’t call it flaming for nothing!
The original post has 58k views, the correct information has 2k. That is the level of efficiency that site has in disseminating correct information.
a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes
The timestamps imply the correct information is less than an hour old in that screenshot
So is the incorrect information
Good Morning X User.
Before you can continue using the site, we must inform you of these 126 posts you saw that were misinformation or outright lies.
Please consume each post for 30 seconds and then you may continue.
Prev/next
My point was not that X would be able to do something about this, but that it is not a source of breaking news, and fundamentally not a replacement for journalism…and should not be used as such.
Ya, it’s definitely shouldn’t be a source. I think it would be great if all sites had something like this though. Retractions on reputable news sites also go by unnoticed.
Imagine going to the BBC website and it showing you that with 2-3 articles on rare occasion.
Aptly put lmaooo, gonna quote this in the future at some point xD
This is something AI would be good for
Have it search for specific misinformation and reply with a canned response with sources using an official account.
Or someone can just train an AI to spit out more misinformation.
Then it’s going to be AI vs AI
In this case the misinformation AI will be run by Musk’s sugar daddy Putin so it won’t get banned
Dead Internet Theory and so.
Or someone could train a bot to exaggerate misinformation from known liars
Community note: In fact, Oregon sent over 420 fire trucks but due to the rampage of the woke chupacabra and the cannibals of the northern California mountains, only 69 made it as far south as Sacramento. At that point California officials realized that Oregon actually sent minivans full of weed and spent the weekend hotboxing, using the Jewish space laser that started the fires on the “defrost” setting to heat up the marijuana.
And so, the bot wars started
We’re years in at this point.
dont need AI for this. its why we have systems like webs of trust and peer verification. standard crypto + some social communication solves a lot of these problems.
How can a web of trust prevent Joe-bob from claiming bullshit like in the OP?
first question you’d need to answer is how joe-bob got into the web of trust in the first place. in order for them to abuse their position they needed to be added to your web.
literally what bluesky is doing with their filters.
if you want to automate it… run statistical analysis on the user for how many people ban them. you eventually find the people who are heavy but accurate with the ban button and can use them as inputs. and can use them as early gauges for new accounts. combine that with account age and you’ll eventually get a fairly robust and automated platform for banning misinformation accounts.
Have you seen some of the “factual” information AI states definitively?
Generic LLMs are shit, they try to do everything
This stupid bitch has since deleted the tweet and gotten back to it like it’s another Tuesday. OSFM had to put out a statement correcting it. I hate people.
she deleted the original tweet, then reposted it again.
My bad, you’re right. I tried to check first, but I didn’t have the patience to scroll past her claiming America Is So Back because “Starbucks kicked homeless people out of bathrooms,” so I ended up not seeing the reposted tweet.
She lies, runs away from OSFM, gets community noted, and still, in the replies:
Um, this is 100% TRUE and WOKE Oregon seems to be covering for WOKE California. Leftists stick together.
There are many people whose work and ideas I deeply respect, but even in my weakest moments, I couldn’t possibly idolize them like this useless waste of oxygen does gargling on Trump’s ballsack every day.
Because I’m a horrible person, I can foresee that there’s zero chance I’ll die before doing something monumentally stupid. My greatest shame is realizing it probably won’t be as effective as what Luigi did.
I wish leftists stuck together as much as the right thinks we do.
Ah yes, the notorious CA Border Control keeping visitors out. Make sure you bring your CA visa if you want to enter the state. 🙄
These people are fucking off the charts insane.
Mila Joy fucks DONKEYS*.
Mila Joy is a HORSE FUCKER*.
Leave Xhitter while you can.
*It’s true, because lols
Twitter. It will always be Twitter
Nah fam… twitter dead.
Nah fam… twitter dead.
Nah fam… twitter dead.
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.
Driving Californians (particularly the wealthy and well-connected Malibu celebrity class) insane with rage and paranoia, then pointing them at the milquetoast liberal stand-ins for Far-Left Radicalism, will do to California what it did to New York, Texas, and Florida.
Just a matter of time before the right-wing propaganda machine crushes the brains of the enfranchised class. I’m already hearing my mother-in-law blame the stupid Los Angelinos for raising her own home insurance rates. And more than a few coworkers are smugly insisting this is what a DEI fire department gets you.
Being a Republican allows you to be a smug.Asshole and call it politics
Its not the Republican-ism that comes first. You have to sell people on the “I’m exceptional” mentality first, then insist they’re being exploited by their inferiors. Malibu celebrities are a target rich environment for this kind of delusional elitism.
Expect a lot more Californians going on Joe Rogan and making up tall tales about how the fire was caused by poors and illegals stealing all the good firefighting water, while the state refused help for some arcane bureaucratic reasons related to The Fairness Doctrine.
Nevermind that there is a legitimate argument that deregulation made the fire as bad as it is.
Because one of the things deregulated in the LA area was the building of homes in high fire risk areas. like the ones currently on fire.
deregulation made the fire as bad as it is
The California water system is a dense web of legal contracts between public and private interests. Bad policy made the fires worse, as the central valley was transformed from an ecological paradise into a dried up scrubland. But the idea that California ever really had regulations to prevent these wildfires is naive.
one of the things deregulated in the LA area was the building of homes in high fire risk areas
Fires are running straight up to the Malibu coastline. High risk areas have been expanding with the repetitive droughts and the large agricultural developments of cash crops. You’ve got buildings going up in flames that were perfectly safe to live in 20 or 30 years ago.
Nothing the California state government had done up to this point was preventing the degradation of the local ecology. They’re just at the end of their rope.
Not of the ecology. Deregulation of building codes.
You’ve got buildings on fire that have been standing for half a century. The high winds and brush fires aren’t a result of the building codes. They’re the result of perennial drought and the accumulation of flammable materials in the dust-bowls surrounding LA County.
These articles are where I am basing my opinion from. Note that in the 2nd one, the fires originated in and are either in or on the border of state-designated high risk fire zones.
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I know you’re joking, but let’s not do that.
That’s fair. Not everyone is good at Little League, after all. 😉
True true
Bot? How do we know that isn’t just another of Elon’s alts?
I suppose somebody could check if she’s called him a good father recently…
It’s an tragic fact that correcting a lie is hugely more costly than making and spreading the lie.
But not quite as tragic as me using the wrong article in a sentence this profound.
That basically sums up all of far right talking points
Doesn’t help that a significant number of modern media and platforms is optimized for content lengths that allow one but not the other (headlines, sound bites, micro-blogging, short-form videos).
America does not care about truth. Worse, it actively discourages truth.
Lying is accepted. Making up facts that suit your narrative and shouting down anyone who disagrees gets you rewarded with the highest position of state.
We, the rest of the world, are just watching you guys in horror.
America does not care about truth
Show me a country with social media and I’ll show you people who value making their political opponents ‘look like fools’ by lying.
Almost like that people don’t care about facts everywhere on the planet.
At Least half of us are basically watching in horror from inside.
At least - no, in that case it wouldn’t have happened. At most half. I’d say it’s way below half.
Less than 50% of voters voted Trump.
I’m saying if at least half the population was horrified they’d have voted. The people that didn’t vote are apathetic. You can’t subtract people who voted for him from total and group them as against him
You can when there have been several news stories about groups who abstained or chose to vote 3rd party deeply regretting their choice.
Voters who (to add to your point), don’t represent half the country, because 90 million out of 240 million voters didn’t vote at all. I think the number of non-voters went up a bit but not too far away from the average pres. election
It’s a post-truth world here in the US!
Makes sense. The Internet was the peak of the information age and usually with any cultural push their is the counter culture equivalent. When any truth could be found in seconds we now find ourselves where any opinion can be fed enough backing to feel like a truth.
I like the idea that someone mid fighting the fires, put down thier hose to reposnd to the tweet
The office of the state fire marshal definitely did not put down a fire hose. Or get up from their desk. (or did I get wooshed?)
No it’s just a funny situation to imagine.
Agreed
The problem is that the original tweet will have been seen by many more users than the reply. And knowing what the public is like…
Like it’s stupid how easy it is to make up misinformation and disinformation, compared to how much effort it takes to refute it. Humanity is doomed.
I could just as easily say: “The Oregon fire department couldn’t get to the fires in time because they had been stopped by immigrant caravans, woke transgender hitchhikers and antifa mobs!!!”
Gish Gallup
It also spreads so much faster; I’ll always hear the lie from someone before I get the chance to look it up for myself, so I can’t refute it.
Oh god, don’t give the Directed Unethical Mass Blatherers Aiming Shit Streams Errantly Steadily any easy copy/paste material.
