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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8633 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.

Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.

What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.

My mom's told us a story a bunch of times about how, when she was in school as a kid, one day she and her classmates were told to head out to the sports field because some reporters wanted to take a picture. So the reporters had her and her classmates sit on the bleachers, and took a couple pictures, and then they told the kids to start make fists, start yelling and waving their fists in the air, look real angry. The kids did it, and the reporters took a couple more pictures. The next day, one of those last pictures was in the paper for a story claiming that she and her fellow classmates had staged a race riot.

Point being, it's definitely older than Journolist.

they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.

Don't take this the wrong way (I agree with you), I'm not trying to pull a Reddit "source?" move, but I would genuinely love to see links for each of these things.

I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.

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