I am sure we can all relate to the following quotes. Just look to the extremes south of our border. But it is happening everywhere. It is quite overwhelming. One of the reasons that I am convinced that the world will not escape a major climate change and its related disasters
The quotes are from THE BOOK Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
While we think of propaganda as designed to convince people of specific untruths, much modern propaganda has a different aim. The “firehose strategy” is designed to leave the audience disoriented and despairing of ever being able to separate truth from falsehood. Social media makes it easy to broadcast large volumes of disinformation at high rates across multiple channels. This is part of the firehose strategy. The other part is to deliberately eschew consistency.
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Rather than being careful to convey only a single cohesive story, the aim is to confuse readers with a large number of mutually contradictory stories. In 2016, chess grand master Garry Kasparov summarized this approach in a post on Twitter: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
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And then there is political propaganda. Social media is a more effective medium for spreading propaganda than leaflets dropped from airplanes or high-powered radio transmissions directed into enemy territory. Social media posts are unconstrained by most borders. And they are shared organically. When social media users share propaganda they have encountered, they are using their own social capital to back someone else’s disinformation
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Disinformation flows through a network of trusted contacts instead of being injected from outside into a skeptical society.
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When the divide between political factions grows deep enough, conversations between them stop. Our trust in people and institutions erodes. We lose faith in our ability to make collective decisions. Ultimately we start to question the democratic process itself.
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