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by red-iron-pine 1149 days ago
That is explictly the idea of a lot of propaganda: "the firehose of falsehood".

Keep hammering them with facts, details, allegations, baseless claims, even slivers of truth. The average person doesn't have the time, interest, or capabilities to dig through all of those claims, and will eventually settle on consuming the facts they want to hear. Keep em too confused to do anything except what feels right to their gut.

Unsurprisingly, this was pioneered by the Soviets, and heavily used by the Russians, both via foreign agit-prop, but also heavily on their domestic audience.

See also: The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

2 comments

You can think of it as "ain't nobody got time to sort through all of that". Or you can think of it in Bayesian terms. If you adjust your priors at all based on propaganda, and there's enough of it, then eventually your priors become what the propaganda says.
Not quite.

The more important thing is to plant a core idea in someones brain. If someone thinks that liberals are all degenerate scum that want to degrade society, no amount of anti republican propaganda is going to convince them otherwise.