Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

There’s also something to be said about not only being “just as bad”, but being righteously self-unaware about it.

This the result of the two party systems. Bi-paetisan compromise is rare, and even then is often backdoored with legislation not actually discussed.

This leads to the two parties only ever being in an adversarial relationship.

In other systems, sometime you get to make a majority government with other parties. This differi means that in mutti-party systems the "party line" is "these guys are ok, and reasonable" every once in a while.

Not so in the two party system, where the winner-takes-all perpetual adversarial relationship generates a constant steam of "the others suck, are dumb, evil and want to destroy the country"

I wouldn't say they are just as bad. They are also bad but they're bad in a very different way. The far right effectively has decided that objective reality doesn't exist at all. The truth is whatever they say it is and they will manufacture data as necessary. The far left on the other hand believes in data but is constrained by their inherent need to reduce every single problem to a combination of race, sex, or class, no matter how multi-faceted / complex the problems actually are. They start from the conclusion and work back to make the data fit. Where the far left and far right overlap is that they are both virulently populist, they both demonize their opponents, and they both believe in the absolute moral purity of their cause.

Also watching from a distance, what’re you talking about? The American right media moguls have fucked up Australian politicsalong with it, and no leftist moguls can claim the same.

One of these sides has literal, actual Nazis trying their level best to destroy democracy, supporting and protecting people who are murdering people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and others who don't fit into their fascist ideology, and remove most of the legal rights women have gained over the past century+.

The other side has...politicians who are too beholden to corporations to fight as hard as they should for progressive policies.

If you genuinely think that the American left is just as bad as the American right, then either you really haven't been paying attention, or...I guess you think the Nazis had a point or something?

I think there's a lot of stuff that goes around and left circles that is pretty bleeding heart sort of exaggeration. A lot of the "Now This" content is rather heavy handed.

But the vast majority of people on the right swallow as gospel every single bit of misinformation, and they are much more adept at getting the vast majority of the right in lock step with their misinformation. A great deal of Republicans for instance still believe that the election was somehow stolen, when it is now, because of all of the lost court cases, the most proven outcome in American election history. They believe the propaganda so much that even though they may agree with a lot of the facts that line up with the fact that it wasn't stolen, they still "believe in their hearts" that it "must've been stolen."

I don't know a better way to describe the most desired outcome of really effective propaganda than that.

I can think of a handful of "left" (for the US) outlets that I think produce content that's disinformation (for example, the first place I heard heavily play up the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was artificially created in a lab was on an obviously bullshit supplement-promoting program on the Pacifica network), and it should absolutely be appreciated that there are actors intentionally inflaming/manipulating discourse throughout the political spectrum.

But the fact is that few -- if any -- media projects where this is a consistent/repeated problem have the household recognition or reach in the way that Fox News or similar projects on the right do. Disinformation currently plays bigger and more intentional part of the political right. Not because it has to be that way (conservatism certainly doesn't require it), but key figures have accepted it as a significant part of their strategy.

And here we get to the real issue you have. It's not that they started by introducing an example, but that they didn't 'both sides' it... or just pick exclusively on the left.

I don't think even this needs to be politically motivated. For this kind of article you want clear and obvious examples, that are also come up with enough credibility to not be outright ignored. Otherwise you have to get down into the weeds of a very particular situation to clearly establish that the example is misinformation, and not just information.

When it comes to obviously outlandish yet widely acknowledged statements... I don't think I have to go too far out on a limb to say the right is a particularly good place to look.

That's not to say it can't be politically motivated, but I don't think it needs to be.

I don't understand the propaganda that you must be exposed to to not understand that that is exactly what the guy said? https://youtu.be/ZX-tRTD1lqU I mean I know he followed it up with a whole crap ton of qualifiers but if you look at this video that's pretty much exactly what he said.