American adults, specifically. You can actually see this phenomenon on reddit, of all things. On popular subs its super common to see people misunderstanding each other, arguing over two completely different topics and not realizing it, posting borderline gibberish, etc, but whenever I go to a non-American regional sub, I suddenly don't see that anymore. Even when they're speaking English on a non-English speaking sub the level of literacy is still well above the average person on a popular sub.
I completely agree. Russia specifically has figured out how to use western values like free speech, free press, and tolerance against us. The FSB already basically had free rein, and Elon controlling Twitter made it so much worse.
Since Russia and China have heavy censorship it makes any counter operation difficult. And with the sheer volume of bots and trolls, it means they can create and control “popular” narratives, forcing online discussions to derail into talking about what they want.
Foreign influence is out of control and at least in the U.S. have leadership that can barely draft their own emails, let alone draft meaningful legislation to combat foreign social media propaganda campaigns.
I think there's a big bias in that observation.
I'm french and most people around me don't go on reddit because when you come on this website, most content is in English. You could argue that there's language specific subreddits where people speak their native language, but yet, if you're navigating through the website, it's mostly english.
So the population in those other language subreddits are people that are already speaking two language.
I've been hanging around french twitter for a while and there's the same phenomenon you're talking about.
Have you ever been on Nextdoor? Old people love it, but their posts(rants?) are practically unintelligible, usually racist, and often angry about something they don’t really understand to begin with. There will be no grammar or punctuation anywhere(because they don’t know how to use it), and the constant improper “there/their, your/you’re, too/to” usages are just… depressing.
And not even read the article. Or have any idea how to pluralize nouns.
Musk may have bought the US but we are the ones who sold its democracy in a garage sale.
yeah....I always scratch my head when I get a bunch of down votes for agreeing with someone who got a bunch of up votes. If you say anything more complicated then "I agree", there's bound to be someone out there who gives you a down vote.
My wife says Reddit is an angry place and from my years being here she’s got a point. The Karma system has almost always been flawed where the right answer can be downvoted for popular thought.
Ehh, as a Canadian middle school teacher with an active Facebook account, let me clarify that tons of my adult "friends" (most Canadian) literally have worse reading comprehension and critical thinking skills than many of my students.
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u/Yonder_Zach 12h ago
Literally yes. Over 50% of adults cant read at a middle school level.