[fieldcny]

There is no evidence that the media was part of the conspiracy, they just parroted the talking points and a few media outlets did heavily question the rationale.. the fact is both wars were hugely popular when they started so few listened.

This is not even close to a comparable situation to the social medial platforms, these platforms and democratized and weaponized mis-information. But it not just them, the ad-funded internet creates perverse incentives for views not truth, FB et al don’t care about truth they care about engagement, they know emotional touch points particularly angry drive engagement so their feeds optimize for that.

Our fractured society is just an emergent behavior from several complex systems with poor incentives, as such we need to find out a way to realign the incentives

[u801e]

> the fact is both wars were hugely popular when they started

That was the case in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq. There were significant protests against the planned invasion.

[fieldcny]

there were protests, and quite large ones but they were almost exclusively from the left and were generally categorized as just being people that didn't like Bush.

Gallup polling shows 50-60% of Americans supported going in just to remove Hussein, in the first half of 2003 only 23-27% of Americans thought it was a mistake to go in to Iraq. see here for tons of polls done https://news.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx

Despite seemingly everyone's revisionist histories, the country was scared and generally whipped into a frenzy, the right wanted it, the centrists wanted it, some of the left wanted it.

[jessaustin]

...the country was scared and generally whipped into a frenzy...

Yes that's what is discussed above: who did the whipping, and how they did it.