[tsol]

>My view is that the press 'narratives', even if they technically 'do not lie' (i.e. standards) are more damaging than for example, QAnon

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.