[throwkeep]

Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finally broke though, but it took over a year! Although without social media, maybe that process would have taken decades?

[Der_Einzige]

Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from the ground up".

[klyrs]

It's not even hypothetical; governments can and do fund astroturfers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368214