zlacker

> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.

Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.

>>kristi+(OP)
We tried that, and it turns out you can't trust people to exercise their critical faculties. Haven't you been paying attention?

>>kristi+(OP)
> Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties

That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.

>>saulpw+Lb
Ah right, yeah, because the Guardian-reading, PPE-educated, civil service "concerns have been raised" class that we trust to govern in our enlightened best interests have been doing such a fantastic job of things. My mistake.

Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.

>>kelnos+Tg
The failure of coastal Liberals to talk to anyone apart from themselves in successive elections gave you Trump.

>>kristi+8k
This is a tangential argument. I want neither foreign nor domestic propaganda infesting our information streams. We seem to agree that people as a group are quite prone to systemic influence, and the fact that US corporations do it does not mean that we should allow everyone else to do it too!

>>saulpw+et
Largely, you've got it already - but a lot of the propaganda (and by far the most influential form of it in Britain) is aimed at propping up the mores and power structures of the prevailing establishment.

The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.

The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.

It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".

By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.