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by macrolocal 1027 days ago
> And if that happens, the audience moves on.

For what it's worth, this idea that propaganda is noticeable is itself propaganda.

1 comments

The issue isn't about propaganda itself, and more that it's hard for anyone to keep up with a fickle audience.

Even a "pure entertainment" product that doesn't need to do any particular ideological heavy lifting has a hard time. If you're taping an episode of a sitcom today, the language you use might have passed to "cringy" by the time it airs, and the trend you used as a plot device might have fizzled.

Social media's ability to stay relevant is managed by constantly eating its own-- people fall in and out of trend. That makes it harder to use as a means to inject a specific message; you'd need to be constantly generating new users and getting them into closed circle communities as the old ones wear out their usefulness. Note I don't say impossible, but it's an interesting set of challenges and probably pretty different from the ones the guys running Radio Havana face.

All they need to do is slightly bias their recommendation engine, maybe in different ways for different users. Not too hard using Monolith.