As you may have noticed, the USA is currently experiencing the most ferocious propaganda war that the world has ever seen. If you haven’t noticed…
Well, yeah. Propaganda works.
But you can fight back, both in the world and in your own head.
This is a very good discussion of how to do that:
What else?
I was just watching this. BUT I am going to sleep and won’t be back to discuss it until Saturday night or Sunday morning.
It isn’t all obviously political:
Check FiveThirtyEight’s guide to fake polls too.
I always checked sources where I could, but I never noticed how both grassroots and bizarre propaganda efforts were until the 2016 election when you could literally go onto somewhere like /pol/ and see the crafting memes by committee and making them seem legitimate while knowing they are not. I mean, you have everything from Joe Rogan claiming the SPLC is out of control today on twitter because he believed the people he met over sourced fact checks that show they lie about their history to Louise Mensch and Kim Dot Com being primary sources for news.
A part of why so much propaganda is crude and obvious is for the same reason as why so many email/phone scams are crude and obvious. They’re deliberately selecting for poor critical thinking and low scepticism.
But not all of it is crude.
People and bots can amplify each other:
Good discussion of psychographics, Cambridge Analytica, Russian bots, etc.
Long, but clearly written and comprehensive.
A good survey of the recent major fascist disinformation campaigns.
Great read.
Propagandists in action:
I wonder what Dickbag Adams’ view of what a typical response to finding out your brother killed 5 dozen people is…
I am not going to listen to one hour of podcast to find out about US propaganda. Do you have a transcript?
No, that podcast doesn’t have the budget for fhat sort of thing.
And no summary either? No list of the points discussed in that hour?
The webpage for that episode is here:
It includes a brief outline of the episode, although that mostly just describes the examples they use in the discussion.
Thank you. I am probably not in the right demographics for that “repost to all your friends” craze, so I should be almost OK.
Avoiding Twitter/Facebook/etc will help to personally avoid the most intense stuff, but be aware that essentially every major journalist on the planet is a Twitter addict themselves.
