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"Even in long-established democracies like Germany, Spain and Italy, false news reports and hate speech on social media have whipped up grass-roots populist mov

"Even in long-established democracies like Germany, Spain and Italy, false news reports and hate speech on social media have whipped up grass-roots populist movements, which have often targeted the recent influx of Middle Eastern refugees, to garner wider electoral support." I'm from Spain and I haven't seen such a thing. To be precise: in Spain the movement that is typically called "populist" by the establishment is Podemos, which by the way is pro-refugees, and fake news have been widely disseminated (originating in conventional media, although being distributed in social media too) to discredit them. In fact they have won several lawsuits in the courts against newspapers that published absolutely made up news about supposed illegal funding, etc. (but who cares about the lawsuits and meager compensations they get, once the information has been publicized, the damage is done). I haven't seen any "pro-populist" fake news circulating around, though. The establishment parties have so many open corruption scandals that there is no need of any fake to discredit them. As always, journalists make up whatever they need to go on with their "good vs. evil" narrative where everything the establishment doesn't like is "populist". And then the blame is on social networks...

mxfh 10y ago
At least in Germany the whole AfD-Pegida-komplex had significant backing and media support from foreign sources, namely Russia and Switzerland. It's the "when they go low, we go high" fallacy that will cost more elections to moderates. If it's free for all psyops out there, the non-authoritarians need a emotional-demagogue front-outlet too. If bot's and brigades are one-sidedly spamming controversial twitter hashtag or or comment sections it's an inflation of their presence. Hashtags are useless for anybody who wants to hear a plurality of opinions these days. As long as social media is so easy to exploit by organized actors at marginal costs, it's worse than no social media at all. If a channel is brigaded and spammed by one party it should be spammed by all, some sort of MAD-strategy might be needed, to get past the current status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

mxfh 10y ago

At least in Germany the whole AfD-Pegida-komplex had significant backing and media support from foreign sources, namely Russia and Switzerland. It's the "when they go low, we go high" fallacy that will cost more elections to moderates. If it's free for all psyops out there, the non-authoritarians need a emotional-demagogue front-outlet too. If bot's and brigades are one-sidedly spamming controversial twitter hashtag or or comment sections it's an inflation of their presence. Hashtags are useless for anybody who wants to hear a plurality of opinions these days. As long as social media is so easy to exploit by organized actors at marginal costs, it's worse than no social media at all. If a channel is brigaded and spammed by one party it should be spammed by all, some sort of MAD-strategy might be needed, to get past the current status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction