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Comment by ziggyzecat | Hacker News Reader

German here: plenty of pro America, anti Chinese and pro Ukraine propaganda in my feeds. Lot's of it full of AI bits, mixed videos with AI and real footage, partially from other wars and or years old mixed into current, potentially staged bits (it's mostly clusters of facial expressions and gestures that make me doubt but also environment, intensity and location of sweat and dirt and positioning of items and vehicles and stuff, in 'artificial(learned actually, semi-professional) relation' to buildings). It's horrible.

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Meh.

Probably the reality is that the internet is filled with propaganda. Every site. Every forum. Even HN is filled with anti-(put pretty much anything here) propaganda.

Try to ignore the noise and tune in more of the signal. That's about all you can do really.

I'm not sure banning websites will do much for you, as you two are rightfully pointing out. You ban a website in Brazil? Well, OK. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in Brazil, but the rest of the world keeps getting the anti-Brazil propaganda. You ban a website in China? Well, OK. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in China, but the rest of the world keeps getting plenty of anti-Chinese propaganda. You ban a website in the US? Same thing. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in the US, but the rest of the world keeps getting plenty of anti-US propaganda.

The word propaganda itself has been a bit bent out of shape in the last century. It just means to spread information. Information itself is more-or-less inherently biased (as in, not objectively neutral in an omniscient way) and so everything is basically propaganda, although not in the scary obvious way that word usually implies.

Dead Internet Theory in action. Bots spamming garbage to other bots, mostly, with the goal of squeezing into the cracks to hit a tiny handful of vaguely receptive users.

The problem with banning things is actually a bit more subtle than just that. Propaganda in isolation isn't necessarily a good or a bad thing. If Big Vegetable embarks on a multi-billion dollar campaign to push pro-vegetable propaganda, that is probably a win for the rest of us. But if Big Tobacco does something similar it is more of a loss.

So we need a mechanism to decide if a specific type of propaganda is acceptable or not. And, if governments get involved, typically they will start restricting propaganda that is truthful but threatening to their chances of holding power (ie, people pointing out the flawed nature of the powers that be). It is better force people to fight propaganda with counter-propaganda and let individuals make their own mistakes.

> It is better force people to fight propaganda with counter-propaganda and let individuals make their own mistakes

The problem is information flow. Propaganda vs propaganda, nowadays, is in-group information and desires fighting against other in-group information and desires.

The lack and importance of truth, facts, the bread and butter of journalists, investigators and scientist, gets out of focus because of governments and other actors blocking access to data, events, locations, partially because often enough, people asking for access tamper with the evidence or start to run all kinds of narratives that would impede an investigation and results that could be 'useful'. There is, of course, much more to all that.

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