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I can't blame Youtube, or any social media here at all. The enemy here is ignorance which is the root enabler for spreading this garbage. The only way to fix th

I can't blame Youtube, or any social media here at all. The enemy here is ignorance which is the root enabler for spreading this garbage. The only way to fix that is via education. Good luck. A well educated populace that thinks for itself is less profitable because you can't sell them a line of bullshit. And you wonder why education budgets are under attack. Another issue is how we humans emotionally relate education with self worth in society. Ignorant people don't like to be called ignorant. Educated people telling them they need to be smarter is insulting. So there is a tendency to distrust educated people because the ignorant persons perception is that educated people think they are bad or broken and need to be fixed. If they don't feel bad or broken then there must be something more to this, why are we being manipulated... (conspiracy can then take over) So perhaps we should rethink how to approach the problem and realize that ignorant impressionable people are a given. Instead of trying to fight propaganda with education we should disguise education as easy to digest propaganda. Don't fight fiction with facts because you're always going to lose. Just start your own propaganda machine and hope you can out smart the stupid. Sure it's manipulation but how much longer can educated people stay righteous while the world is being burned down around them by the ignorant?

jerf 7y ago
"Instead of trying to fight propaganda with education we should disguise education as easy to digest propaganda." How is this different from what we are already doing? I do not just mean that as mindless snark. There's a selection effect, where children can only handle even more radically simplified versions of reality than even our feeble adult minds can handle, so by necessity, it's already been processed down to that level because nothing else would stick even a little. A common example is "The civil war was caused by slavery", which gets mocked, but it's not like there's any explanation you can fit into a middle-school textbook that isn't just as simplified and loaded with the biases of the simplifier. (Which themselves are the result of the bias-loaded simplifications that they were themselves fed....)

jerf 7y ago

"Instead of trying to fight propaganda with education we should disguise education as easy to digest propaganda." How is this different from what we are already doing? I do not just mean that as mindless snark. There's a selection effect, where children can only handle even more radically simplified versions of reality than even our feeble adult minds can handle, so by necessity, it's already been processed down to that level because nothing else would stick even a little. A common example is "The civil war was caused by slavery", which gets mocked, but it's not like there's any explanation you can fit into a middle-school textbook that isn't just as simplified and loaded with the biases of the simplifier. (Which themselves are the result of the bias-loaded simplifications that they were themselves fed....)