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The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing groups etc. as being the fault

The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing groups etc. as being the fault of misinformation on Facebook Whatsapp and their recently target telegram. I don't think that's right. Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it. In my experience (i.e. people in my environment) many people had such believes long before Facebook or Whatsapp became widespread in their social circle. The difference was that it often wasn't noticed as much until they felt threatened in their way of live, e.g. because of pandemic relateed measurements. Or their conspiracies affected you or made you personally angry/offended. Many of this movements often had been ignored by the government as "just a few crazy people" for years even when it wasn't just a few people anymore (e.g. Reichsbürger). Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine) have even gotten support from major political parties for years (e.g. green party). And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they felt threatened and insecure. But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that worse due to incompetence especially around media competence. The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where communicated. And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right where often converted as scientific fact. This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to push people further down in the wrong direction. And from what I can tell I'm 100% sure there are some (multiple, distinct) highly intelligent and skilled people spreading and pushing some of this misinformation for whatever reason. Worse when the public media saw this problem instead of reacting with honest open communication they decided they needed to be even more manipulative to protect society. Problem: That doesn't work if it does the manipulator to convince more people by pointing out the manipulation, then through manipulation on their site make it look worse and use the human fallacy of thinking in "black and white" (1) to increase the believe in conspiracy theories of their victims (2). (2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to one manipulation (1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to do with skin color.

commandlinefan 5y ago
> increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything. I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along. The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?" In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.
VMG 5y ago
This 100% my experience in Germany as well. Thank you for articulating it so well. There is zero political skill of anticipating counter-reactions in the government. The perfect example of this phenomenon was the discussion around vaccine mandates. In 2020, mainstream politics dismissed all mentions of vaccine mandates as dangerous misinformation spread by right-wing conspiracy theorists. In 2022, mainstream politics is in favor vaccine mandates, and brands mandate opponents as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a complete disaster.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything. I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along. The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?" In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.

VMG 5y ago

This 100% my experience in Germany as well. Thank you for articulating it so well. There is zero political skill of anticipating counter-reactions in the government. The perfect example of this phenomenon was the discussion around vaccine mandates. In 2020, mainstream politics dismissed all mentions of vaccine mandates as dangerous misinformation spread by right-wing conspiracy theorists. In 2022, mainstream politics is in favor vaccine mandates, and brands mandate opponents as right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a complete disaster.