I'm dating myself with this, but I remember a time where communication over the internet was niche enough [read: required enough effort] that not everyone was using it and so governments didn't spend their time and money astroturfing online.
I would say there is a difference in media and mass media regarding use for propaganda purposes. What you remember is internet beind a “media”, and now its mass media
Yeah but that just proves the point. Not enough people were using it. You know what they were using? Their TV's and radios. You know what was heavily a tool of mass manipulation? Those TVs and radios.
One could argue mass media as an indocrination and propaganda tool dates way back to invention of the printing press around 1440. Internet is just another form. Brain chips are probably next. /s
The media isn't just the Internet, the Internet is just the new popular media. Before that it was newspapers, radios, TVs etc. I bet no matter how old you are the popular/mainstream media of your youth was held hostage by oligarchs
Now we have things like the media lobbied "agency privilege" in Germany, which means you can publish any given bs as long as it was part of a press agency release without fearing repercussions for it being a false report.
This allows for very cheap automated publishing of whatever a press agency puts out as factual news, without even a human journalist involved, let alone one that knows anything about the matter reported.
I'm assuming the same or similar is in place all over the western world.
The internet changed the game. You can't rely on being factual anymore when someone with an iPhone or some blogger is going to beat you to the story and get all the clicks, so accuracy has taken a backseat to speed.
It also largely doesn't even matter, because people believe literally anything as long as it's presented as a headline over an image. I've lost track of how many satire articles and straight up fiction has made it to the internet being reported as legitimate news and people get enraged over it when it was never true to begin with.
Not to this level. Not insidious and in everything. Not designed to suck you in and create echo chambers. Not designed to keep you ignorant of anything but your orange Messiah. (I know he's specific to the US but it still gets my point across even if you aren't from the US.)
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u/HUEHUECOYOTL_xd Jun 17 '26
My brother it was always like that