Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

> Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine...

What? Yes, it did, that's literally what it did do.

I wasn't using "machine" in the figurative sense of an advertising department, I meant "a literal machine", like Twitter's algorithms. I can't imagine Phillip Morris in its heyday having 1% of the influence that Twitter enjoys today.

I'm not sure why we have gone down this rabbit hole, but you're just mistaken.

Phillip Morris used its propaganda to lie to people about health risks and "benefits" of smoking, sold an addictive product to addicts, and used its resulting people power to subvert democratic decisions.

It didn't do this with transistor technology, sure. But cigarettes have hugely more Daily Active Users than Twitter, still today.

You're insisting on fighting that straw man. Yes, Phillip Morris used propaganda and influenced a politician here or there. That's fundamentally different than Twitter, whose very essence is a machine for influencing people at scale, including who they vote for. At a certain point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind.

You could argue that "airplanes are no different than hot-air balloons" on the basis that they're both aerial modes of transportation, and you'd be right in the strict sense that you've framed the debate, but you'd be ignoring the original point and steering the debate away from anything that might be considered insightful. Frankly, I don't have any interest in engaging in that kind of discourse (and also it's generally against the spirit of this forum).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com