Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
The difference now is the speed, cost and scale. It is super cheap to spread crap today than ever. Also it is quick and the reach is massive.
By the way, Manufacturing Consent is a depressing book. You’d lose what little faith you have in media, if you read it…
Maybe it's not what I should remember most, but it did help remind me that when your livelihood is based on what you say you will be much more measured, regardless of the subject.
Probably why people look to social media or Substack for more independent people who have a longer leash, less on the line, and more to gain, since that's where you get your interesting although many times wrong takes (e.g. Ivermectin for Covid, or Lab Leak Theory)
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dangerous ostracization."
Very tame "Our blender spins twice as fast as the competition" marketing might be arguably free of ideology, but that's a decreasing minority.
I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.
That’s not how this works. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would say.
A woman may never consider buying power tools because of the imagery of the propaganda surrounding power tools. Or the salesman may undermine, intimidate, or otherwise obstruct her attempts to purchase one. But regardless your point falls apart because the ideology of capitalism underlying the power tools on the shelf subsumes the ideology of the advertising.
That subsumption, however, does not in any way contraindicate those ideologies present in the advertisement’s framing. It only demonstrates that money is more important than the other ideologies being peddled.
Quite often I default to the word propaganda when talking about anyone's PR campaigns in my own personal battle with trying to undo this. I ratchet it up when talking directly to marketing/PR people. Pretty much every time I'm just looked at as yet another crazy person.
Marketing often includes the peddling of an ideology as a foundation for the product buying, especially for big-ticket items. (One buys the product that fits and signals one’s ideology.) To me, this makes marketing even more insidious as we often focus on the product rather than the message. Think Ford, Tesla, Apple …
And guns.
Literally the raison d'etre of PR | propaganda is to distract, to replace, to (in modern terms) throw a dead cat on the table and have everybody talk about that.
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
Propaganda only seems to work in two situations. The first is on topics people know nothing about. Each time the US invades some places most people couldn't even find on a map, support for it rises in accordance with the propaganda. But as people learn more, and gradually form their own values, that support tends to rapidly decline. And there are also long-term consequences, because people will remember being lied to. My views on the US war machine and geopolitics in general seem unlikely, at this point, to ever change. And they were largely formed due to the Iraq War. Irrefutable [1] and Undeniable [2] are two 21 year old articles I still go back to on occasion.
The other situation is when it's true. During the Cold War we spread endless propaganda about things like having stocked store shelves. This is doubly effective in the same way that lying propaganda is doubly ineffective. Because not only does it create a desired perception, but once people gradually find out it's really true, it also tends to turn them against their own government who invariably misrepresents such situations. Again, people don't like being lied to.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
The belief that holding strong opinions protects against propaganda is dangerous. Strong opinions is where propaganda inserts its levers.
Here's AI Trump and AI Biden debating live now on Twitch (video isnt great as of today but the voices are) https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2157689323
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command is the closest thing that we have today. It's not a formal branch, though, but rather a joint effort across the existing branches.
A cursory look and it seems Germany and China were first to having a specific branch, but China dissolved theirs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_and_Information_Domain_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Str...
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
The US hasn't been especially loud about it, but it's been a dominant force in 'internet warfare.'
This is not a war.
how competent they actually are at this, who knows...
US military spent over half a billion on war propaganda - outsourced to experts.
The stated purpose was to flatten the curve.
> Who benefited?
The government.
> How?
By giving the impression that they were doing something.
> Why were the curfews necessary to achieve those goals?
They weren't, as far as we know. In Quebec's case they were still scrambling to justify them a few hours before the press conference:
https://www.thesuburban.com/news/legault-s-curfew-decision-w...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/curfew-legality-queb...