3 ms·

Do you know other examples of such misinformation?

newnewpdro 8y ago
An obvious one which comes to mind from childhood memories is the campaigns surrounding the effects of tobacco smoke. The industry flooded the media with misinformation for a number of years, and it was incredibly effective at turning smoking into a divisive topic where smokers were fighting for something by embracing ignorance just to spite the non-smokers / be "free". It was a serious battle just to get smoking banned from common interior spaces like restaurants then bars, that wasn't very long ago. It's insane. I don't think I need to make some kind of exhaustive list here. Climate change is another obvious large-scale disinformation campaign. EVs vs. gas vehicles is another particularly hot one over the last decade. Countless times I've seen a talking head on a screen claiming EVs are no better, that it's just a longer tail pipe. Completely disregarding the fact that EVs enable options for clean energy production, an impossibility when everyone's physicaly driving the actual oil combustors. Even if we continued using fossil fuels to generate electricity, you can do it a lot more efficiently without being space, safety, and weight constrained like you are under the hood of an automobile. Not even considering solar/wind it's an obvious win. This stuff is so effective on a large subset of the population because we don't do a good job educating people and have long had a strong culture of celebrated ignorance. We don't optimize for producing skeptical, critical-thinking folks in our public education system. Such people don't make good consumers, it's bad for business. An unfortunate effect is when you optimize your population for consumerism/business interests, and politicians are marketed for elections through the same means as commercial products, you don't really have a democracy anymore. It's just something going through the motions of being a democracy. The influence is too reliable and its control too concentrated. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is a good example of how bad it's gotten.

An obvious one which comes to mind from childhood memories is the campaigns surrounding the effects of tobacco smoke. The industry flooded the media with misinformation for a number of years, and it was incredibly effective at turning smoking into a divisive topic where smokers were fighting for something by embracing ignorance just to spite the non-smokers / be "free". It was a serious battle just to get smoking banned from common interior spaces like restaurants then bars, that wasn't very long ago. It's insane. I don't think I need to make some kind of exhaustive list here. Climate change is another obvious large-scale disinformation campaign. EVs vs. gas vehicles is another particularly hot one over the last decade. Countless times I've seen a talking head on a screen claiming EVs are no better, that it's just a longer tail pipe. Completely disregarding the fact that EVs enable options for clean energy production, an impossibility when everyone's physicaly driving the actual oil combustors. Even if we continued using fossil fuels to generate electricity, you can do it a lot more efficiently without being space, safety, and weight constrained like you are under the hood of an automobile. Not even considering solar/wind it's an obvious win. This stuff is so effective on a large subset of the population because we don't do a good job educating people and have long had a strong culture of celebrated ignorance. We don't optimize for producing skeptical, critical-thinking folks in our public education system. Such people don't make good consumers, it's bad for business. An unfortunate effect is when you optimize your population for consumerism/business interests, and politicians are marketed for elections through the same means as commercial products, you don't really have a democracy anymore. It's just something going through the motions of being a democracy. The influence is too reliable and its control too concentrated. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is a good example of how bad it's gotten.