Millerites

Millerite

The Millerite story sounds almost impossible. In the mid-1800s, hundreds of thousands of people believed the world would end on a specific, prophesied date.  It's easy to read that and assume it could never happen today, because we have more information and more education. After thinking about it, I believe the opposite today.

What worries me is how easily people get persuaded without noticing. Social media algorithms do a lot of that work. TikTok is the worst example I can think of. As we talked about in class, it reinforces the beliefs you already have. Reinforcement bias has never been more prevalent in our history.  The more you watch one kind of content, the more of it you get, until your feed feels like proof that you are right and everyone else is wrong.

It also divides people. Girls are often shown one version of a story while guys are shown a completely different one, and the result is that we end up angry at each other. I believe that this is intentional by some group of people who benefit from keeping everyone divided. This causes people to be pushed apart and kept engaged by outrage.  Everyone believes whatever TikTok shows them is right, and they even take extreme measures to defend their belief even if there is no proof behind it.

A Millerite had one preacher, one date, and a community pushing them toward the same belief. Today the same pull can come from a phone, personalized for each person, without anyone standing up and making a prophecy. If millions of people will believe what appears in their feed, then something different but similar to the Millerites could happen again. It would just look like a "trend" instead of a movement.

My takeaway is that persuasion works best when you don't notice it. The first step in resisting it is asking why a platform is showing me this, and who benefits if I believe it.  

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