You and me are pretty similar ages.
I do have some Gen X friends who I think are not doing much better.
I wonder it being a “digital native” gives some level of defense against this kind of stuff versus people who were born when information was newspapers, radio, and the TV news one hour out of the day.
“Water is wet”.
This is based on my personal observations. The Boomers in my own family distrust all doctors because of what ever adolf1488 or whoever is posting on Twitter. And they seem to be entertained by some of the most obvious AI slop videos that feels like the digital version of jingling keys in front of a toddler’s face.
The same people that told me that “TV will rot my brain” seem to have no information literacy.
Not specifically no. Either you’ll want a country with good privacy laws that will make it bureaucratically challenging to get your VPN provider’s logs (the provider should be in such a country as well) or a country that isn’t in great terms with this one.
But the location of the operator in important too. If you’re using a VPN server in Somaliland (I don’t even know if such a thing exists), but the operator is in Pittsburgh - you’re not doing yourself any favors.
Yes, and you should probably be doing that now anyway.
I think this is an important comment.
I also was becoming skeptical of what was and what wasn’t being reported through those channels right about the time that I got access to the Internet. That skepticism towards what we now call “legacy media” did prime me to be way more open to hearing people on the Internet claiming to know “what’s really going on”. Not proud to say it, but I did have a brief season where I was tuned in to what Alex Jones was saying.
Had smartphones been a thing then? Maybe I would have turned out like the very folks this thread is talking about.