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Comment by Steltek | Hacker News Reader

What would you do to combat the deliberate misinformation campaign that is weakening the US and many other countries? While propaganda and polarization are not new, the speed, reach, and aggregation are only possible with modern communication.

An early tidbit that may have been lost with deplatforming was that Euro leaders also disagreed, citing that only the state could be trusted with that power. However, the US Constitution mostly prohibits that route and it's left to private companies to make up their own minds about what content they want to host.

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It's a hard problem for democracy, the best countermeasures I know of are transparency and education, but those are mitigations at best, you can't really do much if a majority of people believe an untruth.

You could also elect me as your benevolent dictator, I'll be happy to bring the misinformation to an end, but the lie I'd tackle first would be that this has anything to do with democracy.

> you can't really do much if a majority of people believe an untruth

Treat the propaganda campaign like the war it is - and arrest those who are serving as foreign actors for treason.

The earlier people are finally willing to admit Russia and China are waging a war against the whole Western world, the better.

The big multipliers - #45, Alex Jones, Fox News, Newsmax, OANN - are publicly known, as are most of the people spreading the stuff on FB, and can be taken down. No need to resolve to a surveillance state, just public information is enough.

But if you're going down that route then why should other western governments not treat the US as a threat too? There's extensive spying going on by the US against them and there's plenty of American propaganda too. Should Europe ban Hollywood movies? Arrest American businessmen for spying? Where does it end?

> admit Russia and China are waging a war against the whole Western world

To what end? What is their motivation? They’re evil cartoon villains and hate our freedom? What’s their gain?

Their motivation is self preservation. Western democracies make it pretty clear that they do not support the existence of brutal dictatorships. Thus brutal dictatorships are motivated to act in ways that can weaken the western democracies.

> What’s their gain?

For Russia? Being able to rebuild the Soviet Union. Just look at Crimea, or read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics which is essentially a playbook of what Putin has done.

For China? World domination for Han Chinese, nothing less. They are taking over entire countries by "debt relief" aka loan sharking, and leaders who don't want their "investments" simply have their assets taken away by force like the Philippines.

Both can only follow through with their plans if there is no united opposition against them. Europe is falling apart on a national level with nationalist, often Russia-backed anti-democrats spreading discontent and hate, and the US is collapsing in ethnic and class war.

> The earlier people are finally willing to admit Russia and China are waging a war against the whole Western world, the better.

Hasn't the USA been aggressively exporting its values and memes (ie. Engaging in cultural warfare) for almost a century now?

I'd abolish the worst purveyors of misinformation: Namely, all of the people who are trying to censor "misinformation" so that they cannot have their propaganda challenged by an empowered public that no longer needs gatekeepers.

How do you handle content designed to flood the public and manufacture a narrative ?

I mean you want the “public” to be able to “challenge” the misinformation.

But fundamentally the public has N number of compute units per day and the attackers have N^N compute units.

This is throwing unarmed citizens directly into an army trained to crush unarmed citizens.

The attackers are DESIGNED with the awareness that people will be having this argument on hackernews.

> What would you do to combat the deliberate misinformation campaign that is weakening the US and many other countries?

Which one? Plenty of candidates depending on which part of the political space your views lie in.

Is it the misinformation campaign that Trump won the last election? The one that says third world immigration is good? The one that says Democracy is good? The one that says COVID is harmless?

If there were some Oracle that could tell us what is true or false then this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

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