Fired after I let my boss know my son would die “not long” after birth

As someone who has done research into how emotions diffuse / travel on social media I'm convinced that these accounts are mostly designed to induce feelings of helplessness and/or depression in the reader. When you read this scamtastic OP's story what do you feel? Outrage that a boss could be so shitty and cold-hearted, anger that the labor laws in the state or country are so crappy, etc. Basically, through this (made-up-for-discord-feels) anecdote from OP you're feeling mad, helpless, and like the US' economic and social system is really messed up.

There's a browser extension from some company in Israel that measures 'influence campaigns' on social media and classifies the 'influence campaign' along several axes. Some of the axes were things like 'helplessness / depression'. I don't remember the name of the extension, but this sort of 'haha, the system is cruel and will crush you and there's nothing you can do to prevent it' sort of psychological manipulation is a classic tactic of a certain country's foreign intelligence activities.

This book from Thomas Rid might be illuminating for folks: https://profilebooks.com/work/active-measures/

(Bonus points with these stories are that the accounts gain A LOT of almostexclusively positive karma, so the accounts can be re-sold on those account selling websites. More nefariously, these 'aged' accounts can be used in the future to run even more far-reaching psychological manipulation operations. 'Aged' accounts - old accounts with high positive karma - are favored by The Algorithm in a lot of ways, so if you can engineer a bunch of accounts with very high degrees of positivity - 99% upvotes; very few or no downvotes - those accounts are viewed by The Algorithm as being 'trustworthy'-ier and more 'worthy of content amplification' by The Algorithm in the future.)

/r/antiwork Thread Parent