Controls the world.

Digital PR, SEO and AIO is a real threat to our freedom and a real threat to truth and knowledge, which poses a threat to democracy and life in general. For those who don't know, the idea behind these things is to boost your content above others by using (basically) an arsenal of technical and specific tools and methods.

In an ideal world, people would view content they want to because they want to, and they would find the sources they want because those sources are true (or at the very least say "we don't have all the information"). Such a system would be incredibly difficult to make and would mean people in a pretty big way would control the info; which is not a good idea.

Today, people view content and consume media (overwhelmingly in most cases) because an algorithm has given it to them. As we know, it is possible to game the system and get shown above others. And in such a system, truth does not matter. The technical indicators, how interesting something is, how engaging it is, each matter much more than if it is true or not.

Don't get me wrong, i personally do SEO and Digital PR all the time, i even offer it professionally! But i am very firm in my position on human freedom; that it is very important. But many of the other people who work in this area do not even think about this; they think about doing their job and getting their client into AI mentions and to the top of search. Which is fair. But i think there are thousands if not millions of people who are being advertised to in this way and don't know it, which is a problem.

But what's even more of a problem is that the ability to publish ungodly amounts of content and have it found is being increasingly democratised and public and free. To test this, i did an experiment. I won't go into specifics but it really is possible to change what an AI says about something if you play your cards right and make enough content about it. I didn't spend any money especially for this experiment, yet it made its way onto search and AI mentions.

Literally anyone can sway information in this way. And it's very easy to sway information without it being obvious to the reader that information is even being swayed. And anyone can do this, the more effort and the more money you put in, the better and more effective it is.

I don't really have a solution to this, but being aware really is the cure here. If we can recognise this and know that actually this is happening, we can handle it because we know what is going on. If we don't know what's happening, we are under the control of what is happening.

I believe that the way out of this is going to happen if we like it or not; the internet will be so flooded with polarised and lying content that people will learn to not trust it. Or they do trust it and we are doomed.

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