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by jollybean
1664 days ago
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Totally agree, but the net misrepresentation, or strong editorialization from Cable News may actually be more damaging that the perverse stuff on Reddit. Watching the Kyle Rittenhouse coverage, pre-trial, from Fox and MSNBC was like watching the Soviets and Americans combat each other with propaganda. Actually watching the trial and the information as it came out felt truly enlightening. My view is that the press 'narratives', even if they technically 'do not lie' (i.e. standards) are more damaging than for example, QAnon or Flat Earth. We are being told what to believe and I think this has a much stronger effect than we realize, because it even works on people who are pretty smart. Self Awareness takes effort to accept that there is bias, to really open one's mind, to search for uncomfortable facts, to accept them at face value, and then to think about it outside the concept of some accepted ideology or worldview, and the social/group pressures that apply. It's just too easy to be influenced by talking heads. |
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I would disagree here. We are being told what to believe but that's nothing new, just look at how much press coverage minority issues got 100 years ago. Qanon, on the other hand, isn't misrepresentation but outright misinformation that turns some into outright insane conspiracy theorists believing JFK Jr is returning from the grave.
And one of the more insane subreddits, I got linked from a nursing subreddit, is a "penectomy" subreddit for people who want to remove their members, not because of gender dysphoria, but because of a sexual fetish. I regret to say there were pictures as well. That's straight up mental illness, but it's got a whole community to validate peoples delusions. The power to normalize is as worrying as the power to fashion a narrative. It's more than political, it encompasses everything.
Anyone who's been on /b/ can tell you, while the media is awful, places where CP is so common there are memes about it represent another level entirely. In a sense that's being told what to believe through social concensus. It'd sound insane to say one of the most popular websites in the early 2000s regularly had CP posted but it's okay because that's just free speech. Unless you've been there, which many people here have, in which case it becomes normalized and just "one of those bad things that happens regardless of policing". That's so much more worrying to me than governments and the media trying to control information as they always have.