4 ms·
Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Bi
by speff 3y ago
Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand.
Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
- andoando 3y ago100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in itself. The most ironic thread I’ve seen was a headline about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda, with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to “oh yeah so true, they’re terrible”. Anyone that actually read past the headline though could see the article was total nonsense. I suppose it may be harder to control since a central authority can’t publish anything they want.
- hellojesus 3y agoAt one point I heard someone talking about how people have transitioned from reading articles to only reading the headlines. Your comment reminds me that many people do this for most of their news. And I'm guilty too. I usually read comments on HN before the article, if even I read the article. Very interesting shift in media consumption, and it may help explain the sensational/disconnected headlines.
- kornhole 3y agoAll information can be considered propaganda as defined by Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda. Yes groups game social media to propagate information. Yes centralized algorithmically controlled platforms are easier to manipulate conversation. Yes you must weed through the chaf of useless opinions. Yes echo chambers are often reinforced. If topics are openly discussed, untrue narratives generally dissolve. What better tool do we have?