On the flip side, if the genders were changed in this situation and the guy only wanted the woman because of superficial reasons like she was attractive or popular, how many people would be saying "he got what he deserves"
This is definitely one of those double standard situations. While we shouldn't be victim blaming, I think there's something to be said for calling out people who are willing to throw away an existing relationship or form a new relationship just because an "influencer" came up to them and they thought they were rich. And I think that's what the poster you are responding to was getting at.
I think it's completely fair to have an honest conversation about what could cause someone to be enticed by a large number of followers, but I don't think that OP was making space for that conversation. It came off as victim blaming because there was no attempt at nuance or unpacking the fact that these women were targeted by a conman and that we really shouldn't be blaming them at all.
Again, can we please not victim blame? Calling this a failure, saying that they must be "so shallow" to fall for a fame scam is analogous to saying "she was asking for it because of the way she was dressed" to a rape victim. Being a human is complicated and there are many reasons a victim can fall prey to a scam. It's not as one dimensional as you're painting it and regardless of how shallow a person is, no one deserves to be taken advantage of. The focus of discussion here should not be the victim, but rather the perpetrator and the fact that they are out to take advantage of others. That's abhorrent behavior and we should keep the focus squarely on them.
I don't want to blame just the victim, I want to blame everyone, society included.
Also I don't think that someone's behavior choice is comparable to their clothing choice, and I see much more than a single problem in this whole situation. It also isn't any inherent weakness or any sort of coercion that are getting exploited, everyone is free to leave at any moment.
no one deserves to be taken advantage of
Agreed.
The problem is that everyone in this case is trying to take advantage of someone, they just differ in what they want:
one wants money
another wants sex
last one wants clout and money
We can agree that the main instigator is the seller, taking advantage of the others, but that doesn't mean the others are completely innocent; they can't be, or the whole scheme wouldn't be possible in the first place.
(in a sane world, I'd expect the only one to get scammed would be the buyer... but I know that groupies are a real thing)
I think we should ask why each one of them wants what they want, and why are they ready to jump at the opportunity of taking advantage of someone else in order to get it.
Then we could ask what could be done to prevent the whole situation from being possible, at every level.
PS: in some jurisdictions, there is a "funny" situation where lying to get sex is a felony up to certain age... but once it's between "consenting adults", lying to get sex is perfectly fine! 😒 We could also take a look at that, how is it possible to give consent while being lied to.
I don’t think that someone’s behavior choice is comparable to their clothing choice
I completely agree, but victim blaming across choices and especially towards women and POC individuals is part of the reason we have really shitty reporting of fraudsters. Creating an environment which discourages them from speaking up is harmful to society as a whole.
everyone in this case is trying to take advantage of someone
We don't know this, and we shouldn't assume this of the victim. I think it's a reasonable hypothesis, but focusing on talking about the victim here when there are actors which are clearly out to harm or take advantage of others is harmful framing. If this is a discussion you wish to have, I personally believe the appropriate framing is necessary - we must acknowledge the existing structure of power and how it silences certain people and also blames them before talking about potentially problematic behavior. But even then, it's kind of jumping to conclusions about the victim here and I'm not so certain it's a discussion that should even be entertained.
victim blaming across choices and especially towards women and POC individuals
I don't know about the US, here in Spain the love scams, and fame scams, are a thing across all genders and orientations, with low reporting of scams in general being attributed mainly to shame of the victims for having fallen for a scam.
People like to think they're smarter than most other people, and the more sure they are of that, the easier they are to fool. I think it's no wonder they don't want to acknowledge it afterwards.
everyone in this case is trying to take advantage of someone
We don't know this, and we shouldn't assume this of the victim.
I don't see how else it could work... but I'm open to hearing alternatives?
we must acknowledge the existing structure of power and how it silences certain people and also blames them
Fair.
A relevant aspect I can think of, is the part about it being fine to lie to have sex between "consenting" adults. How can there be consent, when one or both parties are misleading the other? Sounds like an officially codified permission to abuse.
I don't get what people see in fame or clout, it looks like lying and argument of authority to me. The fact that anyone would pursue or get influenced by either, seems to me like ingrained predisposition to getting abused (by authority figures). Not sure how much of that is inherent, and how much social.
A clearly perverse incentive in the whole scheme, is money... but that's kind of unavoidable in any money based society.
The elephant in the room, is sex itself: how can it, on one side, make someone pay and lie for it, and on the other side be used as a bargaining chip. Is it a purely hormonal catalyst for the whole scheme, or a proxy for a power play?
The "thousands of people" watching your "stream" are bots. They can respond to what's going on in the video in real time because they're bots. Actually I technically think this would be more efficient and therefore is probably designed so that it's only one LLM pretending to be thousands of people, but I'll call it bots because that's easier to visualise. The bots know what's going on in the "stream" because they can understand what the "streamer" is saying, which means the pickup artist can put on a convincing performance to trick the mark. If it was just a recording, it wouldn't be able to respond to novel situations caused by the mark's behaviour.
I don't actually know if this technology even works, but that would be the intent used to sell it to pickup artist bros.
I'll never understand the people that fake these kinds of things. Fake watches, fake followers, fake views, fake likes, fake jobs. Why?
What's attractive about likes and views anyway? Why would I care that my date has 0 followers or a million followers? If anything it means they'll constantly be busy streaming.
I'm a very private person. I barely use any social media where I'm not anonymous, and I wouldn't want my wife to be famous either. So take this with a grain of salt, but I think it's about winning the trophy. A million people like this person well enough to watch their content all the time, but they are with you? I can imagine that would be flattering to a certain kind of personality.
Being popular sounds wretched to me, but people chase it all the time.
"Maybe if I date someone who's famous, they'll have enough money that I won't have to worry about paying for medical bills or groceries anymore. Gee, maybe we could even buy a house and raise kids."
We live in a capitalist hellscape where such things are no longer taken for granted, and are now associated with the heights of success.
They're insecure and hate the real version of themselves is my interpretation. Instead of confronting that and moving forward with work to become a better person they instead put up a facade, often justifying the harm they do to the people who believe in the facade by convincing themselves that these facades are common to all people, and everyone is fake
I remember reading a melodrama from the 1800s where the protagonist, a failed writer, makes a deal with the devil to have a bestselling book. In the second half he becomes wildly successful, but is tortured by the knowledge that he is genuinely mediocre. It always stuck with me. Reminds me of people buying Likes.
This seems to be sleazy conmen faking interactions with women to convince wannabe pick-up artists to pay for their app. It's like some new circle of Hell.
Really the only trick they missed was turning it into a pyramid scheme but that might sneak in if you use the app a lot, although imagine the "success rate" on this is abysmal and a lot of users will drop out quickly.
I'm not sure about that. The only examples given in the article of this actually "working" were from people directly advertising the product. The women in the videos are quite likely to be associates or paid actors, as is the case with most of this stuff on social media. The whole concept of the product relies on the misogynistic myth that women only care about money and/or fame, so to assume the app itself is actually working is kind of implying that you believe there is some truth to that myth.
the misogynistic myth that women only care about money and/or fame
Genuiney disheartening that this shit is re-surfacing again. I remember this sentiment going about around a decade ago, and then subsiding. Now it's resurfacing. Every generation loves to repeat the mistakes of it's past
Comrade, Gulag is wonderful place, many nice people and beautiful beaches. Food is amazing and lots of beautiful women. You get a new set of clothes and your very own room, which is very secure. You will have the best time!
I can't help but wonder how in the long term deep fakes are going to change society. I've seen this article making the rounds on other social media, and there's inevitably some dude who shows up who makes the claim that this will make nudes more acceptable because there will be no way to know if a nude is deep faked or not. It's sadly a rather privileged take from someone who suffers from no possible consequences of nude photos of themselves on the internet, but I do think in the long run (20+ years) they might be right. Unfortunately between now and some ephemeral then, many women, POC, and other folks will get fired, harassed, blackmailed and otherwise hurt by people using tools like these to make fake nude images of them.
But it does also make me think a lot about fake news and AI and how we've increasingly been interacting in a world in which "real" things are just harder to find. Want to search for someone's actual opinion on something? Too bad, for profit companies don't want that, and instead you're gonna get an AI generated website spun up by a fake alias which offers a "best of " list where their product is the first option. Want to understand an issue better? Too bad, politics is throwing money left and right on news platforms and using AI to write biased articles to poison the well with information meant to emotionally charge you to their side. Pretty soon you're going to have no idea whether pictures or videos of things that happened really happened and inevitably some of those will be viral marketing or other forms of coercion.
It's kind of hard to see all these misuses of information and technology, especially ones like this which are clearly malicious in nature, and the complete inaction of government and corporations to regulate or stop this and not wonder how much worse it needs to get before people bother to take action.
I believe Tim means to say that the spread of misinformation can be linked to the rise of Flat Earthers. That if we can only trust what we see before us, and we see a flat horizon, we can directly interpret this visual to mean that the Earth is flat. Thus, if we cannot trust our own eyes and ears, how can future courtroom evidence be trusted?
"Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality." -Bucky Fuller
That's highly subjective, but the fascinating book The Dawn of Everything argues otherwise. There are even parts about the anthropological evidence some peoples just up and changed systems every so often (yes, non-violently). Our problem as people in the modern era is many can't imagine anything else, not that no one ever did.
That might work for now, but AI bots can easily create more content faster than human moderators can go through. We will need mechanisms to prove humanness.
Yea, it will be a hard problem to solve. There’s no good solutions right now. Hopefully someone with the creativity and skill will come up with something.
It becomes a pain vs gain problem. How hard do you make it, also balancing the inconvenience.
You could easily force users to enter a one time code via email every 3 months (or more or less time). This would be hard to automate and if you changed it up even more so.
Yea, but AI bots do it at an unprecedented scale. The price of generating bullshit is practically 0. There is already cheap AI content every where and people are already getting tired of it. It’s true that human actors has done something similar for a long time, but now AI will make the process so easy that AI junk will be everywhere. Look at Google search results, it’s already filled with blogspam generated by AI. Blogspam was a problem before, but now it’s insufferable. Cheap midjourney “art” is showing up in search results even when you search for real classic artist, you get these ugly AI copies. Generative AI is the ultimate bullshit and spam machine.
404media.co
Hot