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Agreed. Most are very open and public about their activities and purpose. It seems like most conspiracy theories are just honeypots for institutions like the st

• gwervc 3y ago
  The matrix is indeed really strong in the West. At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them. And when given information that contradict their beliefs (entirely constructed from hearsay) they become angry and violent. And I'm speaking of supposedly educated people, about information that are available in primary sources. Ignorance is also carefully cultivated: God forbid to use one's smartphone to check an information publicly and easily available.
  • Zetobal 3y ago
    I would say that the reality distortion field is way stronger in the east... and if you are in a professional discourse it's fine not to have the Junior Dev go "achtually" all the time because he googles shit he doesn't understand.
  • geysersam 3y ago
    I find the claim that people are generally more well informed about the state of the world in countries without a free press and independent institutions quite absurd. The western societies are certainly not perfect, but the messy information landscape in some of them is in my view an indication that different views are able to clash and make their cases with relatively little intervention from the authorities.
    • ekianjo 3y ago
      There is no such thing like a free press. Most media is subject to financial incentives and right and left there are topics that will never be covered even without censorship.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • Xeamek 3y ago
        I mean, kinda? But with this logic it's impossible to ever have a freemedia, or anything really. No human is ever free because there are always some incentives, or even needs (financial, social) one has to adhere to.
    • mrangle 3y ago
      That type of information landscape isn't a threat when it is lies to various degrees, in total. Polls indicate that most Americans don't see the Press as free (trustworthy). They now view it more akin to how people do in authoritarian states. There are reasons for that outside of observer error. What's more insidious? An openly captured press that is expected to lie or a captured press that claims the banner of freedom? Last, objective observation of lock-step action of institutions over the past seven years or so, for example, seems to hint at a lack of independence. As would any indication of a concrete lie that the press seems to be cooperating in hiding.
  • ethanbond 3y ago
    Surely you can produce examples of obviously false things that are close to universally believed by “the West” then? Usually when people make this claim they go on to list actually ambiguous or actually controversial topics.
    • the-dude 3y ago
      Some obvious false things only need to be true for a limited time : Iraqi forces throwing Kuwaiti babies from their incubators, Iraqi WMDs, the 'missile gap'. These were universally believed by "the West".
      • raccoonDivider 3y ago
        The Iraq WMD thing is the one everybody has been falling back on whenever they need to prove their claims that "all western media are propaganda" for a decade or more. It's been 20 years, the NYT recognized the lie and apologized, and these guys still haven't found a better example. Doesn't the lack of newer, more convincing examples tell you a lot about the veracity of the claim? Edit: didn't see the missile gap thing, did you add it later? AFAIK, that was more of a lie by the US Air Force to increase their funding and actual government officials believed it.
        • the-dude 3y ago
          I am not sure how to respond to your comment : one gets the impression it is a criticism, but actually you are only acknowledging my claim 'things only need to be true for a limited time'. Who cares about the NYT? I did add the missile gap later, I am sorry. What does it matter who's lie it was? Kennedy ran with it.
        • symple 3y ago
          Iraqi WMD was believed enough by the public to make it politically infeasible for most Congressmen to vote against authorizing war against Iraq. That the NYT later issued an apology is irrelevant. Iraqi WMD is a great example of manufacturing consent long enough to push through a major policy blunder. In retrospect the effort was comical enough, in light of the fact that none were found, that the one responsible for it (President Bush) famously joked about looking for WMD under a desk. He received no real political backlash for his joke or for being vile enough to start an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands. The propaganda surrounding the global war on terror was effective enough that when the U.S. performed terrorist acts on weddings that killed innocents it was labeled “drone strikes” and when the enemy performed acts that killed innocents they were labeled “terrorist attacks”. People initially believed the b.s. the Pentagon said about Tillman’s death. People largely believed that Chalabi would be the political savior of a new Iraq until our government no longer liked him. There are people who still think we shouldn’t trade with Cuba because they are communist but see no problem trading with China. Criticism of Israel is often times labeled anti-semitism. Do more than a small minority of people understand that Jews aren’t the only semites in the world? I can’t point to too many specific instances of U.S. media engaged in outright propaganda but there are some clear trends where the collective attitudes on certain topics/beliefs are engineered to be a certain way. The fact that people even ever seriously uttered the phrase “war on christmas” is enough know that opinions are deliberately being manipulated by media.
  • flir 3y ago
    The flip to "Russia == Evil" when they invaded Ukraine (the most recent time) was impressive. I'm not an apologist, I think Russia is currently [insert long list of bad things here], I'm just impressed at the speed we went from indifference towards Russians, or tacit approval (oligarchs in London), to sanctioned hatred.
    • the-dude 3y ago
      Similar flip with China. I do read user comments on our Dutch news-sites, just to keep an eye on 'average Joe'. I am amazed by the hatred towards China.
    • ekianjo 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • flir 3y ago
        Heh. No, you're the bot! It's difficult, isn't it. You can't even discuss the phenomenon without looking sus. Talk about a poisoned well.
    • raverbashing 3y ago
      I think you're missing a big part of XX century history on the factors that lead to that
      • flir 3y ago
        Maybe, but I don't think so. The 2014 invasion was met with a resounding "meh" in the west. So what 20th century factors caused us to go "meh" in 2014 and "orcs! orcs!" in 2022?
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          MH17, and the lack of plausible deniability. The 2014 invasion was just that, but was dressed up as something else and didn't include massive Russian army deployments in the build-up. It also didn't look like something that could happen to Romania, Poland, the Baltics or Finland. All of which have more in common with Ukraine than they do with say Afghanistan. So 2014 wasn't 'meh' for those that are more politically informed but it wasn't something that registered as a threat to the bulk of the EU and didn't include actual threats not to get involved on punishment of nuclear bombardment by the belligerent. But even today there are a lot of idiots here who are still in 'meh' mode and who couldn't care less about what happens to Ukraine and who would rather think about this in financial terms than in loss of life or what it means for the future.
  • PeterisP 3y ago
    The key difference is that in autocracy you'd assume that most information on the controlled media is somehow propaganda from your government but in a free media environment you'd assume that you're getting a mix of psyops operations from all the major powers in addition to your own government's propaganda, and also media controlled by specific wealthy private players with a personal political agenda.
  • ricardobeat 3y ago
    > At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them Pretty much the opposite. In authoritarian states, people grow up under the culture of just accepting things as truth, you don't have the option of not believing. What you are describing is not about believing the press, but polarization / radicalization / isolation - the fact you're even pointing to the 'press/propaganda' is a symptom of it.
    • impomura 3y ago
      ^ person that has never spoken with a Chinese national spotted
    • amon22 3y ago
      haha, no
  • boppo1 3y ago
    > about information that are available in primary sources. Can you give an example?
  • concinds 3y ago
    One fundamental fact is that psyops can be benevolent. Psyops are made by elites to affect the masses' beliefs and behavior; they reflect the interests of whichever segment of the elite has manufactured them, but sometimes these interests overlap with our interests. For example, "the War on Terror is necessary to protect America, democracy, and our freedoms" was a psyop driven by dubious foreign policy interest. "Kindness, dignity, empathy and tolerance are good, racism is bad" was a very benevolent psyop which you can recognize throughout elite cultural products (12 Angry Men, Mr. Rogers are just two examples), where the elite tried to cure the masses of their bigotry through psychological means (identity, social pressure, morality), with relative success. "Russia's invasion is morally wrong and must be defeated" is both aligned with US geopolitical interests, and aligned with defeating international anti-democratic anti-liberal forces, which is in our interest. There are obviously Russian/Chinese/Iranian psyops deployed against us, and some of our elites' psyops are just designed to counteract that. I doubt the masses will ever have the ability to fight back against psyops, because in a battle between psychology PhDs and confused laymen, the PhDs will always win. We might learn the truth about specific psyops 30 years after the fact if we're lucky, and the well is highly poisoned by paranoid conspiracists. So a more realistic goal is to select trustworthy elites that are more likely to engage in benevolent psyops.
    • concinds 3y ago
      Another key concept is that there's no "elite", there are elites, plural, which may cooperate or engage in intramural conflict. The military-industrial complex, Republican elites, media elites, and to some degree Hollywood elites cooperated to our detriment during the Bush years. But any analysis which sees them as a single blob will miss the conflicts and realities, hence the inane schizoposting ("Soros = CIA = military-industrial complex = mainstream media = Chinese Communist Party" as an all-powerful colluding elite, which prevents any useful analysis). Yet another problem is that once people realize psyops exist, they tend to go off the deep end (if they already distrust any elite interest group) and reflexively disagree with all goals they attribute to those elites ("they say Russia bad = I'll support Russia"). Essentially the psyops are backfiring and creating a populace so distrustful that some people will reject domestic psyops only to replace them with foreign psyops, because they have a strong need for a narrative, and a great number of narratives are elite-created.
  • paganel 3y ago
    > The matrix is indeed really strong in the West Which is a very stupid "strategic" move by the powers that be in the West, because if you control and strongly influence the discourse in the direction that you want that means that you impede the system the opportunity to self-correct. And that opportunity to self-correct in the past was one of the main advantages the West had, an advantage greatly facilitated by a reasonable open and free discourse.
  • swayvil 3y ago
    A smartphone that delivers an infinite buffet of hearsay isn't precisely smart.
  • happytiger 3y ago
    Just 38 years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Now, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom. This means that just 232 media executives are calling the shots for the vast majority of the information we are presented with as a society. Let that sink in. And remember media bias and polarization is presented as a broad conflict that can’t be managed and is out of control to the point of causing extremism. Consolidation of platforms and reach is much greater in the tech side of the arena. Then there is the consolidation of independent media on tech company platforms like YouTube. If they ban someone, are they really running off to make a living on Rumble? No. There are only 11 independent investigative journalism groups like ProPublica and The Center For Public Integrity but they are a shadow of their formers selves. https://civilination.org/resources/investigative-journalism-organizations/ https://civilination.org/resources/investigative-journalism-... You can check all the information sources you want, but primary source information means very little when the landscape lacks real diversity and the only substantive public oversight is underfunded or politically connected. And then, there’s the research that shows fact-checker bias: https://phys.org/news/2023-12-fact-checkers-tend-validity-news.html https://phys.org/news/2023-12-fact-checkers-tend-validity-ne...
    • mike50 3y ago
      CBS-Viacom is now Parmount
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• t_mann 3y ago
  The Behavioral Insights Team was and is a unit established to implement the ideas of (now Nobel-memorial-laureate) Richard Thaler on 'nudging'. The tiny problem with those ideas is that the evidence we have is that they don't work, at least no more than the RCT equivalent of a placebo (ie publication bias) [0]. Mentioning it in the context of psyops seems like a bit of a red herring to me, the biggest conspiracy here might just be the one to create prestigious and lucrative jobs in government for social science graduates. [0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2200300119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2200300119
  • reedf1 3y ago
    Regardless of its effectiveness (I largely agree with with your posted study), the negative externalities of attempting to "nudge" and control the narrative are enormous. You now have government departments with an existential motive to subtly alter news stories, guidelines, public messaging - even if the results are dubious, and could have unbounded negative impact on public trust and understanding, etc..
    • nonrandomstring 3y ago
      > could have unbounded negative impact on public trust and understanding Very much this! And to the parents comment, they are seldom "lucrative" or "prestigious" gigs afaics. The bind is that to remain silent, to not engage in counter-influence in a world where the Internet is "weponised", seems like giving tacit assent to mischief makers. The mistake is to think that lies can be countered with more lies. The best that the "truth" can do, whether as science, education or accurate news media, is to de-escalate and neutralise information warfare itself.
  • lukas099 3y ago
    I think the study you posted is valid, but I'll bet that some individual nudges really are effective.
    • _w1tm 3y ago
      You affirm that the study is valid yet still decide to override it with your gut feeling.
• roenxi 3y ago
  There is a perfect level of cynicism here. The people want a simple model of reality. It shows up immediately at all levels of society. Simple messages work in the family, win elections, and persist for centuries whether they work or not when implemented. The tech industry is interesting as an example closer to HN for how management regularly assumes situations are simple despite endless counterexamples. There are threads in the media that are probably government sponsored (topically, John Brennan going CIA->MSNBC or the Twitter files). The oversimplification is likely because people don't engage with complexity without shutting down. The refusal of the corporate media to learn that War is Bad is probably government sponsored. Even then, the military industrial complex and regulatory capture muddies the water somewhat about who is motivating the madness.
  • ethanbond 3y ago
    > people want a simple model of reality > War is Bad. Come on!
    • roenxi 3y ago
      I dunno. I'm arguing that the media is only going to settle on a simple model of reality and I'm proposing the closest-to-reality model as the one that they'd settle on if not for financially/politically motivated reasoning. The US has pretty much bankrupted itself and achieved not much useful for themselves with their global military expeditions. I think almost everything they've done in the last 50 years has been an embarrassment for them. I dunno, any successes? The worm is even starting to turn on Ukraine as people note the consequence, expense and general lack of good outcomes as the China-Russia-Iran axis gets welded together. They could have shortened the leash of the coup-organisers back in the early 2010s, left Ukraine as a buffer state and avoided the whole situation with better results for ... maybe literally everyone. I mean, it is starting to look like the 2024 Russia-Ukraine border will be the one that could have been settled on pretty early in the conflict with a bit of diplomacy; then everyone digs in and settles for the long stalemate. It beggars belief that a neutrally motivated reporter would still be gung-ho about sending in the troops before thinking. I suppose reporters are a bit slow, but the track record is appalling and the alternatives - some more cooperative diplomacy - so obvious even Trump was talking about it. It was a mistake to demonise that part of his platform. Unless the goal was more war, in which case well done another mission accomplished.
• geysersam 3y ago
  All models are wrong but some are useful. It's easy to say that someones worldview is incorrect in some respect. Can you be more specific as to what common misconceptions you would like to see corrected?
• jampekka 3y ago
  That these are thought of as government goals may be a very convenient belief for powerful commercial entities and other concentrations of wealth. Based on spending it's quite undeniable that vast majority of propaganda is commercial (ads most obviously, but also various lobby organizations).