[salimmadjd]

Have many of us have become the useful idiots of the corporate media overloads?

I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness.

I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs and stickiness. One of the side effects of this content strategy is the divisiveness we see now.

Yes, Facebook (or twitter) amplifies these, but that's because Facebook provides every one of us a platform to exhale the frustrations we accumulate consuming these anger-laden content.

Ingeniously, the corporate media blamed all these on Facebook and whoever is/was advising Zuck really failed to come up with a solid strategy to counter this narrative beyond rebranding FB app icon and some color scheme changes.

[nradov]

It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other. The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game. So before you get drawn into an online argument, ask yourself am I dealing with an authentic person or a paid foreign troll?

This isn't even a new phenomenon. Back during the Cold War before there was a real Internet the Soviet intelligence services did similar things by infiltrating political action groups and paying off journalists to write stories calculated to stoke dissent.

[XorNot]

The problem is it's not an argument that manipulates you, it's passive reporting and it only has to be echoed by one other real person before it becomes "the rumor on the twittersphere" or whatever.

Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.

I get a chuckle every time I see a social media post about <subject> that's some minor mishap and OP is pretending to be repentant ("if only I had <virtue singling trope that applies to that subject> this wouldn't have happend") and all the commenters virtue signaling to each other along those same lines.

Little do they know they're making it seem more normal for people to do whatever sin they're all hating on.

[stuaxo]

This is pretty meta, since "virtue signaling" is just as real as "the culture war" and other myths like the tooth fairy.

[jfengel]

It's interesting that you put it that way. I see the term "virtue signaling" as one aspect of the culture war. It's a blanket ad hominem attack: "They don't really believe X. They just want everybody else to believe that they believe X. X is actually so bad that nobody really believes it." Thus allowing them to sidestep any discussion of the validity of X; they just assume it's false and attack the person.

In practice, I find that the term is mostly just used as "vice signalling". It's not really an argument at all, but rather a call to other subscribers to their ideology that they're all in this together, as indicated by the use of the common buzzword.

The term is used only along ideological lines, and I do believe that those ideological lines are turning increasingly hostile. Calling it a "war" is always going to have weird connotations, but the terminology used for hostility is always subject to escalation.

I do believe the divisions are growing louder and more angry, if not always violent (though there's a good case to be made that they have gotten more violent over the last 40 years or so). Is that where your disagreement is, or is it elsewhere?

[pydry]

Russia and China have to deal with this too (through different mechanisms), so it's not unexpected that they'd do it back.

They are also at much higher risk of fragmentation. Russia with the far east, etc. China with Xinjiang, etc.

I wouldn't expect them to stop unilaterally. It would require a treaty like SALT, which the US has shown zero appetite for - likely coz it sees fragmentation of rival states as a bigger prize than preventing political arguments at thanksgiving.

[blaser-waffle]

Well before even the Cold War. The USSR was pumping lots of propaganda into the US as far back as the Red Scares of the 1920s.

A Clockwork Orange uses Russian slang ("nadsat") based on the aggressive propaganda that was blasted at the West. There are some uncomfortable comparisons to be made with modern times there, e.g. Q-Anon and aggressive propaganda aimed at the survivalist types...

[WalterGR]

It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other.

I see the same behavior in some users here on HN. You could replace "social media" with "Hacker News" and your comment would read the same.

I don't know if you include HN as under the umbrella of "social media" or not, but I just thought I'd point this out. I see lots of people "culture warring" about Facebook and "Big Tech"... on HN.

[FooBarBizBazz]

I wonder if the same thing happens within/between companies. Industrial espionage is a thing. When billions of dollars are at stake, why not "cultural activities" too?

[ravel-bar-foo]

Isn't this effectively what is happening when a major media outlet writes a piece about how $SocialMediaCompany has a racist/sexist "bro" culture or allows racist/sexist $SocialMediaCeleb on their platform? As much as I dislike social media, a lot of these attacks have been made with only minimal substantive claims, so it seems like the real goal is to delegitimize (sabotage) the upcoming/ competing businesses.

[hattmall]

It's a thing between teenage girls (and boys), it's not some new tactic. If you read about Ben Franklin, he was huge into the idea of secret societies of a small number of people. The primary reason was that they were immune to this type of dissent building and outside opinion influencing.

He structured secret societies like an MLM, where you only know you're direct downline, and your recruiters direct downline. Each secret society had 6 members, and each of the 6 members would create another one with 6 members, but never sharing the identities across the groups and instruct each of the six to replicate the structure and so on. Each group of 6 would meet, discuss topics, come to a group consensu, and pass this up and down. This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.

[blaser-waffle]

> This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.

The la-le-lu-li-lo still run the show

[blaser-waffle]

The Wendy's twitter straight up drunks on other brands.

If you're Pepsi, you've got every reason to retweet all of the Coke stuff about "don't be white".

[ffggvv]

it’s not just foreign actors. it’s americans themselves especially journalists. the nyt, cnn, fox news etc.

specifically all rile up division both because of ideological reasons and money

[anticodon]

> The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game.

Russia is bombarded incessantly by US propaganda from US troll factories.

Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.

It's so disgusting that I guess it even somewhat stopped to work because people are tired of this shit.

But nevertheless: any time on any social network there's a post like: "Look, there's a new undeground station opened in city N", there would be thousands of comments like:

- Built on money stolen from us! We don't need no stinking underground, better give this money to starving retired people

- 100500 millions of rubles were stolen during construction by Putins' cronies

- I'm a construction engineer and I assure you it was built in the wrong place by worthless dumb Russian engineers and this will cause the city N to collapse in 10 years

- City N doesn't need new underground stations, it needs more cars, nobody uses underground, what a useless project!

- 10 opposition activists supporting Navalny were buried during construction of this station. Wake up sheeple! You can become the next victim of the regime!

- Putin destroyed education in Russia! Russian engineers can't design anything. The blueprints for the station were stolen from glorious US engineers. Elon Musk designed the station and Petrov and Boshirov stolen them from him! They also attempted to poison him with Novichok but failed again, the dose was too small!

....

Literally hundreds of such comments under every video on YouTube in Russian, every post in Facebook, Vk, Pikabu, just anywhere it is possible to write comments.

And I guess it's even open information that at least 10-15 well funded organizations in US exist to publish this sort of comments. At least I remember reading how some US president assign funds for several such organizations.

It started to happen when the first Internet link came to Russia and it intensifies with every year. We don't have resources to publish as much bullshit as US organizations and organizations sponsored by the US (e.g. in former USSR republics that has cheap labor, high levels of unemployment and almost 100% of the population are good Russian speakers).

[WalterGR]

Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.

As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.

Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?

[anticodon]

As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.

You mean you don't believe me? When you watch Hollywood movies if there's Russian in the movie, would it be a good person? Or most Russians in the movies are blood thirsty villains that love to kill people as a hobby?..

Or have you watched the famous HBO series Chernobyl? Do you think that we really drink warm vodka from the bottle any time of the day? Or that all engineers, managers and government officials in Russia/USSR are clueless psycopaths like they're in Chernobyl and other movies and series about Russia/USSR?

Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?

In Russian. This propaganda is for creating dissent in Russian population, no sense to publish it in English. Besides, you can hire lots of people in poor former USSR republics to publish comments in Russian literally for the price of a bowl of rice. Such expenses are negligible for the US budget, why waste the opportunity.

Conversely, where Russia will take that much money and that many English-speaking people to create the same amount of propaganda? It's impossible. We're losing the war of comments and fake news and we never could win it. I'm really doubtful that we even tried to fight back.

You won't find many people capable of writing texts in English in Russia. And usually those people already have a good job and they're usually on the side of the West, it's very unlikely they would agree to work against the West.

[sunshineforever]

For the Russian perspective, спасибо.

[bostonsre]

I'm not sure corporate media had much choice in the matter if they wanted to survive. Almost all are for profit companies that lost heavily when eyeballs shifted to social media. Social media companies make money off of ads, so they optimized viewership without being concerned with the consequences. In order for corporate media to stay alive and stop hemorrhaging viewers, they needed to play by the new rules. It's a shit snowball that is growing as it rolls down hill and it doesn't seem like there is anyway to slow it down or stop it. Or maybe it's more feedback loop like, like a closed loop toilet where no plumber is brave enough to confront it.

[titzer]

It's an ant death spiral at this point. The only way to be free of it is to unplug and focus on your own life.

[FooBarBizBazz]

> ant death spiral

Great metaphor. Thanks for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill

[bostonsre]

Yes, individuals can flee to get out of the path of said shit snowball, but their descendants, family, friends, and neighbors are directly down hill from it.

[anaerobicover]

If enough people make the choice, it loses its power. It's the same as what makes voting works.

[bostonsre]

I'm not too optimistic that its possible to have enough people willingly boycott these news delivery pipelines to the point where it changes the ad dollar calculus for these corporations. They have been pretty great at cultivating addiction in a large proportion of the population, it seems like an extremely tough battle.

[snikeris]

Individuals can divert said snowball from said people.

[bostonsre]

Do you mean all people? Or a small portion of those people? Maybe building a shit snowball bomb shelter aka cutting internet to a household might be able to save a small portion of those people, but I'm not sure how anyone outside of elected representatives could ever hope to stop it for the wider population when the thing has so incredibly much inertia.

[marcus_holmes]

They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.

The rise of the tabloids in the UK is a good example: highly-partisan papers that appealed to specific demographics with stories that aimed to evoke an emotional response (usually a negative emotion).

It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.

[blaser-waffle]

> They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.

"Yellow Journalism" was a thing as long as we had newspapers and a free press. The term was coined in the 1890s, but was almost certainly around long before then. William Randolph Hurst did what Rupert Murdoch does now, just with slower turnaround time. If you assume Fox News help make Iraq happen, then they've both caused the same amount of wars.

> It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.

It was already there, by a long shot. Internet social media just made it omnipresent, automated, and responsive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

[bostonsre]

Yea, they were definitely ahead of the curve. The rest of the industry still had some soul and dignity for a while there. The hacker news links to news sites with sliding bars for left or right bias are nice and all, but I'm not sure they're doing anything but preaching to the anti tribe choir. Not sure how we go about uniting or at least going the other direction without some horrible disasterous tragedy like a world war or an alien invasion. Would have thought maybe a global pandemic would have done the trick, but not bad enough I guess.

[lend000]

People actively self-select for this type of tribalism. Be it sports or politics, it gives average people the feeling of identity and purpose.

There was a brief period in the mid 20th century when centralized communication was far superior to decentralized communication, and the populous hadn't had much time to apply selective pressure toward more divisive media, but even then, you had McCarthyism, Jim Crow, pro-war/anti-war, etc.

Humans are a tribal species and hate comes easy. You can't blame any single player or small groups of players. It's more of a species level problem. And I'm not convinced the current levels of divisiveness are historically unprecedented, albeit high.

Buried in this otherwise mediocre article posted a few weeks back is a visual called "Ideological positions of the major parties" [0]. It can be a proxy for relative internal divisiveness in the country (note that the lowest periods of divisiveness had high international divisiveness).

[0] https://www.economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Ne...

[anigbrowl]

The media didn't create divisiveness, although significant parts of it exploit the divisiveness for commercial purposes. We have objective evidence of severe legislative polarization at the federal level going back to the 1980s: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[pmoriarty]

"We have objective evidence of severe legislative polarization at the federal level going back to the 1980s"

Political divisiveness in the US goes back much further than that.

In the "you think it's bad now" department, I remember reading about the case of, I think it was in the 1800's, of a congressman assaulting another congressman with a cane over some political issue.

Of course the most infamous case of political divisiveness in the US was the Civil War.. which, judging by the Confederate flags man conservatives/Republicans proudly fly and the reactions they get from more liberal parts of the political spectrum, and the incomplete desegregation of many parts of the country, discrimination against minorities, vilification/adulation of Confederate statues, etc, still hasn't been fully resolved in many people's minds.

Getting to more recent, but still older than 1980's, political events.. it's not like the country was united during the Vietnam era or during that of the 60's counterculture.

Or look at the socialist/anarchist unrest and workers strikes (and police/corporate violence against them) or suffragettes of the early part of the 20th Century.

Plenty of times in America's history when the country was very divided, and today's divisiveness is nothing new.

As long as there's rapid change it's likely to continue, as some people will want to slam on the brakes while others want to go full steam ahead.

[forgingahead]

I remember reading about the case of, I think it was in the 1800's, of a congressman assaulting another congressman with a cane over some political issue.

This was the Caning of Charles Sumner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner

And yes, you and the grandparent comment are exactly right - this has been going on for ages, precisely because the economic incentives of media have been to create strife and discord for the eyeballs (and now clicks). Even in the days before 24-cable news, I remember thinking it would be nice that if when the nightly news came on, they would just say "All is well today. Have a good night!". And close the program.

But they can't - imagine the reaction from their advertising customers? "We paid you for these slots, you jolly well better produce the eyeballs on it!".

The mainstream mass media has been a weapon for as long as it's been around. In previous generations the elites and government kept quiet about it, because it served their purpose of cohesiveness and national unity, especially after WWII. (Never mind the consistent denigration of the Russians externally, I'm referring to internal Anglo Western societies).

But at some point in recent history, it switched instead from being more profitable to have national unity, to being more profitable with national DISunity. And so all and sundry have become "issues of the day", feeding the beast of the content and advertising machine.

[pmoriarty]

"imagine the reaction from their advertising customers"

Imagine the reaction from their viewers!

The sad fact of the matter is that the media strategy you describe would be worthless if the viewers didn't lap it up and ask for more.

The media's just giving most viewers what they want.

[forgingahead]

True, but there is a reason most human societies (excluding the West in the past 10 years) have had strong restrictions on the excesses of human behaviour. Just because the animal can do something, doesn't mean it should, precisely because society as a whole doesn't benefit when individuals do that.

In most societies, you still can't drink to excess and drive, nor advertise cigarettes, nor sell them to minors, nor do all manner of narcotics or have polygamous relationships willy-nilly. All these things are certainly what people would like to if possible, but social norms and laws put a lid on it. There is certainly screeching about some or all of those issues (like by some parties here on HN, Reddit and elsewhere), but by and large those restrictions are good for the functioning of a healthy society.

Media consumption, and in fact media production, was regulated, initially by technology (you couldn't broadcast widely before radio) and then by law (The Hays code in the US and its subsequent incarnations).

Cable defanged that, and the internet has destroyed it.

I'm not for censorship, but harmful media production and consumption should certainly be contained and punished if done with malicious intent. It's not easy though - we all agree that online recordings from certain Middle East groups are inflammatory and can radicalise innocent people into doing foolish things, but we can't see as a society that the same radicalisation has been happening in the Western press as well. The targets are just different.

[watwut]

> Media consumption, and in fact media production, was regulated, initially by technology (you couldn't broadcast widely before radio) and then by law (The Hays code in the US and its subsequent incarnations).

Written media origin however are very inflammatory and divisive writings. Well before corporate media.

[jollybean]

Yes but in the 1880's punching someone wasn't that big of a deal. They could have gone to the bar later and got drunk together and made legislation the next day.

Underneath the House of Commons (and I believe somewhere in US Congress) was a bar, and after arguing in the Commons, everyone would go downstairs and get wasted. The 1st PM of Canada drank 12 ounces a day minimum. Imagine that. 12 hard drinks a day (!).

What definitely has increased is the use of procedural tactics and such manoeuvring, the filibusterer, executive statements, congressman never taking the position of the other side. Also, the Republican/Democrat situation was not divided into urban/rural camps so much until recently, and that's a big kind of divide. 'Everyone' (quotation marks) used to be Christian, at least nominally. The Catholic/Protestant divide was big, but largely due to culture (i.e. Italian vs. English). I feel that the 'Evangelical / Atheist' divide even much wider. African Americans have a voice now (thankfully) and their presence as an active piece on the board can very easily be inflamed either in good faith or sometimes not. The Latino community is massive and they seem to be a 'behind the scenes', silent force, a the MSM doesn't give them the time of day, but they are voting, although pragmatically I don't their presence adds to any negative confrontational dynamic. But those are new vectors for division.

So we are in a new divisive situation there's no doubt about it.

[blaser-waffle]

> Yes but in the 1880's punching someone wasn't that big of a deal. They could have gone to the bar later and got drunk together and made legislation the next day.

Bollocks. Charles Sumner gettin whupped with a cane WAS a big deal and made national and international headlines.

It was a direct response to Sumner criticizing slavery, and helped cement opinions in the South that they'd need to take drastic action to preserve that institution.

[jollybean]

There was tons of physical fighting in that era [1], that some newspapers wanted to make a big deal of a specific fight isn't evidence of that much.

That said, that was probably a very divisive era.

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374154776

[sjg007]

Obama's speech was about hope and change, "yes we can". Yes we can elect a black man as President but yes we can change and do better. This was on the back of Bush's destruction of the economy.

The divisiveness happened when the tea party took off in 2009 after Obama was elected and the tea party dialed up the oldest trope in the book, race. It was also the only part of the republican party that could oppose the ACA. The ACA was modeled on Romney care after all who was a popular Republican. The republican party reeling from the loss to Democrats basically had to double down on the tea party to have any chance of sucess at the 2010 midterms. So it became about race, death panels and socialism.

[mousepilot]

you're right of course, this entire thread seems like trumps "both sides" thing.

the video has some merit, but one of the mistakes in the video (in my opinion) is telling us to "politely explain our side", but I've had much more success being deeply curious about the other side and its been very enlightening. If a friend feels differently about politics than I do, I want to be the sort of person to converse about the differences while keeping the friend. Its never too late for me to learn something and learn I have!