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Comment by Uhhrrr | Hacker News Reader

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It's pretty obvious, media is called the 4th power.

Control the media, you control the information that a significant part of Europeans get. Elections aren't won by 50%, you only need to convince 4 or 5% of the population that the far right is great.

Schrödingers social network: It's somehow irrelevant but somehow "destablizies our democracy" ;)

Irrelevant to most ordinary people in the sense that few directly use it, but popular with the source of much of our discourse / culture. Think journalists, taste makers, meme creators etc.

It gives people who aren't aware of the bot accounts / thumb on the scale the perception that insane crackpot delusions are more popular than they are.

There is a reason Musk paid so much for Twitter. If this stuff had no effect he wouldn't have bought it.

The same way that social media has destabilized the USA.

By exposing people to a flood of misinformation and politically radicalizing content designed to maximize engagement via emotion (usually anger).

Remember when Elon Musk alleged that he was going to find a trillion dollars (a year) in waste fraud and abuse with DOGE? Did he ever issue a correction on that statement after catastrophically failing to do so? Do you think that kind of messaging might damage the trust in our institutions?

> Did he ever issue a correction on that statement after catastrophically failing to do so?

To be 'fair', finding fraud never was the real purpose of DOGE, just some fake argument that enough citizen would find plausible.

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