Serious advice, not a flip complaint: Don't talk to, respond to, or in any way engage with randoms on Twitter or Facebook about politics, unless you know them off-network. Don't read them either, to the extent you can help it.

I (like many others) have studied social media manipulation the past two years. If you are reading this, you are probably from the old Netizen nation: early adopter, you try to think about opinions, and try to remember that other commenters are people.

That may still be the majority of Twitter or Facebook accounts. But the new school does not care about your values. The only reason they are on the Internet is to use it as a weapon to demoralize and disrupt the people they hate.

In this group, there is no functional difference between a bot, a paid Russian employee, and a person who was given a Trump app at church and taught to use it to scream at women on Twitter. Trying to tell them apart is pointless.

Here you can see how KGB-style disinformation and Gamergate-style mob violence are merging and going mainstream. The next generation is going to be homegrown and self-sustaining without those feeders.

If you even spend the time trying to decide who "deserves" your attention, you are losing. Just delete and block. Only spend words on people you know. It's the only thing that ever worked anyway.

I will reply to anything that is easily debunkable with a link, so it's in the thread, and then mute.

Aww, can I still yell at public officials?

Absolutely, yell away. For my purposes you "know them off-network."

Wow. That's incredible depressing to an "old netizen" like me. Does this mean that folks just joining the Net now have no hope of getting what we get out of it?

I think there's zero chance of a new person coming online and acquiring anything like the net-utopian community values from Facebook or Twitter. Maybe they have to use gopher and IRC and pine for a decade first.

more realistically, a radically different space would have to be built that is accessible to new people, but not the online equivalent of late-night Las Vegas Fremont Street where everyone there either tries to scream insanity at you, or rip you off.