For men you have a white power gang in almost every federal and state lockup. But because gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood are patriarchal institutions, women are not permitted to be full members. As such, when a female white supremacist ends up in jail, she is far less likely to find a group which shares the same political views.

You are completely right. There’s an entire ecosystem of right wing propaganda channels out there but most people get their news from their friends. It’s the key phenomenon behind influencer culture. And that’s how most of the damage is done.

If someone has one friend who is considered knowledgeable on current affairs and that one friend watches Fox, chances are that none of his associates will have an accurate understanding of any given topic. And that’s by design. The kind of tripe spread on fox news is inflammatory and salacious. The sort of noxious trash you’d share with friends in private conversation.

I realize this is what TikTok and facebook maximize: The friend effect. People learn from their friends. The kind of lies spread by right wing networks is magnified by social media and Russian bot farms.

But we’re there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.

I think you’re right and that I’ve horribly misunderstood how this data is collected and used. According to their yearly report, mozilla’s advertising revenue is explicitly not drawn from user data and is only related to tiles and default search engine sponsorships. The fact that they are not selling this information is heartening and it inspires confidence that they have not flipped on the ad money spigot.

I appreciate your informed response but no system other than advertising-abstinence is fool proof.

Im saying this as a supporter. My browser of choice is firefox and I send them money regularly. And I understand their need to generate more revenue. But there has never been a company who has sold customer data discretely. My understanding is that every piece of data that’s sold can be de anonymized when combined with other data sets. And the data is horsetraded until it gets into some very marginal actors’ hands.

Mozilla’s need for money is largely driven by massive mismanagement. It should have been fully funded in perpetuity through establishing a foundation that operates off interest payments but they decided to try and build a headquarters in Mountainview. They also operate offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world. They have made expensive software aquisitions. These are not necessary and have only whetted mozilla’s thirst for other revenue sources. It’s guaranteed that they will look for more customer data to sell because that’s the path of least resistance.

I wish them luck but I also wish they’d not chase advertising money.

Even if Mozilla takes precautions to avoid de-anonymizing our data, any private data sold to data brokers becomes a part of the puzzle for learning our identities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification

Even knowing something a trivial as two movie ratings led to a 68% success rate in learning an identity.