The current American culture is so bloody obnoxious and tiresome. My brain got exhausted just by reading the headline of the article. It didn't get any better from there.
A mix of Amrerican exceptionalism, lacking education, cultivated affinity to cult personalities (or just propaganda for simpler term) and a political system that makes participation (outside the elite) very difficult.
Culturally very far from Europeans. Millions and millions of Trump voters are not just an accident but rather a product of American culture.
Buying advertising on Facebook seems to be the defacto way to influence masses.
Facebook has incredibly invasive data collection, aggressive algorithms and therefore very fine grained targeting options and it has a bit over 3 billion active monthly users (many of them 100% captive because they won’t have Internet without Facebook)
The goal of every society should be to free us from wage-labor to pursue other values beyond the bottom of Maslow's pyramid and generating even more wealth into pockets of 0.1%:ers. AI and automation should (in theory) free us to pursue research, art, improving life of others and other things that are actually valuable for the society and humankind.
Universal income is one of the solutions floated around this and it's been tested in some countries, but we're not quite there yet and in any case, most societies need to go through a transition periods where they switch from current free market capitalism to a system where only a minority has to do wage-labor.
In the meanwhile, most wealthy, civilized places have social security safetynets in place even today. These provide minimum income for those who can't participate in wage-labor for some reason (unemployment, disability etc). Minimum income through unemployment/social security benefits combined with free healthcare and education are essential building blocks, even in a society where majority or workforce is still trapped in menial wage-labor systems and this is really nothing new.
Of course the United States is one notable exception to all of this.
Looking at the voter map, I'm not sure I can feel a lot of sympathy, to be honest. It would seem to me that the people made their own bed and now have to lie in it. And much like all other ultra conservative wins in other countries in last decade - the rhetoric of "strong man" seems to be popular, especially in rural, poor areas.
But it's ok, they're manly man tough, like in the good old days, when men were iron and ships were wood!
Leave them to it, they'll tough it out. They've earned it.
People see social media and other things like e-mail and video content as free services.
They just want to join and get on with their lives. Most "normies" don't really care about being served ads or being tracked. If you tell them about the surveillance industry behind the scenes they just shrug and keep scrolling their Insta feeds and clicking their youtube videos. Even people who complain about ads seem to be incapable of action if you suggest they install ad-blocker.
The people who understand or care about the problem are the ones who might donate, but not all of them. It's a subset or an subset.
As Jerry says, the donation economy would not be sustainable if the Fediverse was the size of Facebook. Unfortunately that has more to do with human psyche than actual technical merits of ActivityPub or the Fediverse.
Use Ente photos