L
to digital begging it’s as old as the internet, but more annoying now than when it started. She has been online for more than 20 years and has served for all kinds of causes, until she landed directly in politics to reduce almost any human encounter to the act and art of asking with exaggeration and deceit.
There are meccas for cyber beggars like the site Cyberbeg, which since 2002 has been tracking hundreds of thousands of ads ranging from helping individuals with real emergencies or very expensive art projects in need of crowdfunding, to outright scams.
Only yesterday that platform had raised more than 164 thousand dollars from charitable souls, who prefer to directly help a person for the most dissimilar causes than organizations with cumbersome bureaucracies.
Unlike those who live on the streets, cyber beggars are usually middle class. Karyn Bosnak, the most well-known petitioner on the networks, had an unbridled passion for Gucci jewelry and accumulated a total of 20 thousand dollars in debt while working for television in New York.
Asking for money, he paid what he owed and made the experience profitable. She wrote books and auctioned off the rights to a movie. With the My Free Implants portal, the first social network appears –there are others– whose objective is to put women who want to have breast or buttock surgery in contact with men willing to pay for them, and which hides a somewhat subtle business of prostitution.
But the champions of digital begging effrontery were the ones who invented the Nophone and promised to make a piece of black plastic, in the shape and size of an iPhone, to draw attention to mobile addiction. Why should you give us money for it? Easy. Do you have a camera? No. Bluetooth? No. Do you make calls? No. Will it withstand a fall into the toilet? Yes
. In two weeks he obtained 18 thousand 316 dollars and now the project is a company – without much success, it must be admitted.
It is estimated that the amount lost due to scams of various kinds on the Internet, including false or questionable requests for help, amounted to 47.8 billion dollars in the world during the pandemic. The company ScamAdviser, which prepares annual reports on the matter, stated in February of this year that the number of scams and money lost is likely to be only a small fraction of the actual size of online fraud. Depending on the country, less than 3 percent and up to 15 percent of consumers report such a scam
.
In the business of disinformation, beggars and technology platforms make money.
What does it depend on if an influencer has more direct contributions and reactions than another who does the same? Usually from the decibels I can put on hate speech. Digital content creators who ask their audiences for money, especially those in politics, generate more emotional responses and more volunteers to fund doubly lost causes.
In the United States, a great incubator of Internet trends, narratives about middle classes pitted against global and local elites, coupled with copious doses of racism and sexism and disdain for institutions traditional
with charlatans asking for money to make themselves heard, gave shape to positions that are contradictory to each other, but effective in building imaginaries and mobilizing the White town
of the nation. Along this path, the Americans reached the presidency of Donald Trump and the assault on the Capitol, on January 6, 2021.
Disinformation and polarizing narrative is not the gift altruistic preachers give us. There are thousands of people for whom the Internet offers niches where they can make common cause with people they would not find in their neighborhood, in face-to-face meetings or in the open forums of social platforms. The drive to earn charitable money in conspiratorial communities led to the crazy theory of QAnon, for example.
These wretches 2.0 are very far from the truly needy and very close to the advantages of algorithms, which are addictive by design and take advantage of negative emotional triggers that unleash exhibitionism, disinhibition and a sense of impunity. Miami is the capital of this trade. But that is another story.
