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Comment by lawlessone | Hacker News Reader

>It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait.

It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.

More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?

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> What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos claiming the earth is flat,

this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.

I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat. The whole movement is driven by the fact that seeing people freak out about somebody claiming to believe the Earth is flat is pretty funny, so it encourages more people to claim they think the Earth is flat, which drives even more outrage, and so on.

It's just classical trolling in a world where people no longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple: don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting like no troll ever before.

> I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat.

I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority.

As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high.

And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.

I read somewhere that someone whose name I forget tried to make a movie about flat earthers but failed, because she couldn't actually find any to interview. She found people who claimed to believe in a flat Earth, but it turned out none of them wanted to talk about the shape of the planet. Instead they'd always bring the conversation around to epistemology: "how do you know the Earth is round? did institutions tell you that? why do you trust them? how can one truly know what is real?" etc. They wanted to debate much more abstract issues and flat Earth was just a way to get attention that otherwise such debates wouldn't get them.

I know a family of flat earthers and for them they'll just appeal to the Bible as an authority on the subject. Apparently there are some verses that imply the earth is flat.

I found this out when the 10-year-old son attempted to lecture me on how I should "do my research"--by which he meant, study the Bible.

That sounds like some creative interpretation. It was well known in antiquity that the earth was round, they even managed to calculate it‘s radius. (as well as the size and distance of the noon and the sun).

The idea that everything was made up of 4 elements (or a rather a combination of those) also assumed a round earth. Early things are heaviest and sink to the bottom, water is lighter than earth, air lighter than water and fire is lighter than air (that’s why the stars, made up of fire, are at the very top)

The church never disputed the earth being round. They were pretty adamant about it being the center of the cosmos though, with the sun orbiting it.

FE “theory” often contains biblical references such as “the firmament” which if you try to ask what that is you won’t really get a clear explanation. I can’t stress enough that zero of it is remotely coherent.

Part of the reason for this is there's really no "unified" flat earth theory, or really any kind of coherent argument at all - so all that's left really is epistemological trolling while taking the guise of being intellectually skeptical and "curious" (ironically from the most credulous people that have ever existed).

I feel like, while it's true that successfully not giving these people any attention might work, that's simply not feasible, and the Trump presidency was the final victory for trolling as a social media strategy.

Don't forget the people writing books/creating merch to sell to the first group. There tends to be overlap here with the third group, but not necessarily.

It's the verbal equivalent of an M.C. Escher work.

There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.

> There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers.

How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".

I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed at how many are not.

I went looking for genuine flat earthers in the late 90s. There were far more people complaining about flat earthers than there were actual flat earthers. I could count the number of them I found on the fingers of one hand, and they seemed like they were probably mentally ill. Back then I would say they were mainly an urban legend: "did you know that some people still believe the earth is flat!" "in this day and age? How shocking!". Its mainly just an outrage-bait meme.

I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.

We probably can't agree on a number. But I think it's obvious that they'll never be large enough in modern times to affect anything besides a niche message board in some corner of the Internet.

Just like QAnon. /s

It sounds like gate-keeping too me; like JRE saying there are only 250 real comics in the world or @LPNH deciding who is Libertarian enough on Twitter.

I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I think the demand for this material is created by mid-low intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly all are, for various reasons, trolls.

Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.

So, moon-landing-deniers. Just raising questions?

There are a lot of people who basically believe in a conspiracy of stupid people while at the same time believing anyone who believes in a conspiracy is stupid.

It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.

It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.

Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith, etc...simple memes like this are very effective in controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with simple rhetoric.

It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very effective to call him that and shut off all engagement with any aspects of his critique.

"no vaccine that is safe and effective" sounds pretty anti-vax and impossible to justify with real data.

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4626145-rfk-jr-no-vacc...

Let's never mind that everyone has differing, imprecise meanings in mind for the various words ("safe") involved.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time".

What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.

If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.

People have hyperfixated on "flat earth", probably because it's safe, but QAnon is the same thing only more dangerous.

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