LogFAQs > #910560611

I mean, there definitely have been some ill effects associated specifically with Facebook. There was a study a while back showing that racist violence in Germany correlated pretty strongly with regions that had more facebook use:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html

I'm not sure if correlations have been shown for other forms of social media. It might be specifically Facebook that has these side effects.

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That said, the signs were definitely around for America to slide into some level of fascism back in the Bush era, cause the same guy who predicted the fall of the soviet union predicted a decline in US global power and brief flare up of Fascism in the US by 2020:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7ykxx/us-power-will-decline-under-trump-says-futurist-who-predicted-soviet-collapse

When asked how he predicted a flare up of Fascim back in the Bush era, he basically said that he observed this kind of behaviour back in the Bush era:

The book sets out a whopping 15 "synchronizing and mutually reinforcing contradictions" afflicting the US, which he says will lead to US global power ending by 2020within just four years. Galtung warned that during this phase of decline, the US was likely to go through a phase of reactionary "fascism".

He argued that American fascism would come from a capacity for tremendous global violence; a vision of American exceptionalism as the "fittest nation"; a belief in a coming final war between good and evil; a cult of the strong state leading the fight of good against evil; and a cult of the "strong leader".

All of which, Galtung said, surfaced during the Bush era, and which now appear to have come to fruition through Trump. Such fascism, he told Motherboard, is a symptom of the declinelashing out in disbelief at the loss of power.

I dunno if his predictions will still line up. We haven't exactly seen "tremendous global violence" under Trump, and it's 2018, so there's only a couple years left on his 2020 timetable. Although with his Soviet Union collapse prediction he predicted they would collapse by 1990, and they collapsed in 1989, so Galtung squeezed in under that timetable. If this prediction still holds, Trump will be getting into some wars in the next year or two. But so far Trump has been pretty good about avoiding wars, and the one time I remember Trump supporters being angry with him was when he bombed Syria so.... Jury's out on the "tremendous global violence" part. The flare up of fascim and cult of a "strong leader" do seem to apply, though.
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