Comment by somenameforme 3 days ago
This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0 propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US political establishment. It's certainly not some secret 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-establishment types.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
> If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence western thinking today. Yet western governments are absolutely panicking because Russian operations are targeting westerners, and they're working.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
You're not considering one simple alternative - and that's the best "propaganda", by an overwhelming margin, is the truth. US propaganda worked during the Cold War era because it was mostly just pointing out true things, like having store shelves stocked full of really cheap and diverse goods. Soviet propaganda, by contrast, failed because the truth was not on their side.
And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth - Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left trying to make claims that are simply false - the opposite of all of the above would be an example.
As for governments freaking out - it's because of self interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are holding them accountable and anti-establishment candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously living through a geopolitical inflection point with the decline of one great empire and the rise of [something else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire), and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will likely geopolitically define the next century.
> that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
I don't think anyone believes that they're being successfully targeted by Russian propaganda. A lot of people believe, or claim to believe, that their political opponents have been successfully targeted by Russian propaganda, or that ideas that they don't like are Russian propaganda. But that's not really because they've been convinced of something that strongly goes against their interests/predispositions; it only requires them to believe that their opponents are stupid and they are smart, which they were already predisposed to believe. (And I suspect most of them know on some level that this is something they're professing rather than something they think is literally true)
> people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it
Oh no, people enjoy righteous indignation and so media serves it to them. But the media establishment is not organised enough to direct that, certainly not through some 5D chess logic. Yes you do occasionally see false/slanted stories spread as outrage bait by people on the other side, but when those happen they're done by, like, literally 3 guys, and one of them spills the beans shortly after.
If you want a contemporary example, look at the UK media suppressing coverage of muslim child rape gangs for the past 10 years or so that's now kind of bubbling over into the mainstream discourse. Yes, it's creating a backlash effect, but if that was the deliberate intention then a propaganda payload that takes 10+ years to deliver results is not going to be useful for day-to-day politics (is Russia still going to be at war in 10 years, and if so, with who? Will e.g. Belarus be an ally or an enemy at that point?). And even at level 0 it was never really effective in changing minds - maybe it gave the people who wanted to pretend it wasn't happening an excuse to pretend it wasn't happening, but the people who cared about it managed to find out.
Theories of propaganda masterminds are comforting in the same way that conspiracy theories are - the idea that there's actually some competent entity that's got it all worked out. But in fact any entity large enough to spread propaganda is ipso facto too unwieldy to push anything but the simplest messages.
The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full ideological has led to a polarization in society (or perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has happened) and this has gradually led to people believing in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals want to have children reading gay literature and defund the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some sort of white Christian ethnostate.
Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.
It's not even 5D chess.
They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
It's very transparent.
A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.