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Comment by makach | Hacker News Reader

how does this differ from newspapers, books and the spoken word?

Newspapers aren't nearly as effective at keeping attention indefinitely/at every opportunity, nor at controlling what you read next.

Fox news seems to have done a pretty good job of this in the US

Fox News isn’t a newspaper

Presumably most viewers have chosen that echo chamber, so it really isn’t the same to compare it.

Also Fox News has only a few million viewers each night e.g. “Fox News Channel coasted to an easy win in prime time Monday night, delivering an average total audience of 2.351 million viewers”.

Newspapers don’t modify what I see in the next 60 seconds based on my response to the previous paragraph.

Reach, cost and effectiveness. Newspapers can't follow you around like social networking sites do. A handful of Twitter/FB accounts can do an amount of damage that newspapers can only dream of.

None of which is to say newspapers are great. After all, Murdoch honed his skills in print media first. Just that they are nowhere near as effective as online

A newspaper owner, William Randolph Hearst, once started a war with Spain.

Yes I know, that’s why I mentioned Murdoch. He honed his villainy in print, before moving to TV and internet.

It doesn't. "Propaganda" is a western word for any argument coming from the eastern enemies of the state, and "Brainwashing" is a western word for being convinced by them.

The way we control behavior is by depriving people of unfiltered information, not showing them cat videos and remembering if they liked them.

The modern sense of the word "propaganda" emerged during the first World War to describe information deliberately disseminated to influence political opinion. I'm pretty sure that's still what people mean when they use the word.

Usage then and now also conveys a sense of purposeful distortion or fabrication.

Not everywhere, which is a good thing.

A year ago I saw (and thoroughly enjoyed) an exhibition of 80's arts posters in Spain. What struck me were the description labels, and especially the terminology used. Where the English part described something as "advertising", the Spanish descriptions unashamedly used the word "propaganda".

Let's not fool ourselves. The mechanisms of advertising have been lifted, adapted and further weaponised from war-time propaganda, or as we'd call them these days, influence operations.

...the Spanish descriptions unashamedly used the word "propaganda"

That's not what you think. At the time it was common to use that word instead of publicidad to mean advertising. A construction typical from Latin, propaganda just meant it's made to be propagated, similar to addenda, Amanda or Miranda.

Now it's limited to politics in Spanish too. People working with ads didn't like the connotations of the term, understandably :)

I was pretty amused when I first visited China and saw that the university communications/marketing department translated its name to "Propaganda Department".

In Brazilian Portuguese advertising is still most commonly called “propaganda”.

But it also has the bad connotation when it’s used in the context of politics.

You have to actively seek it out, or be told about it. Rather than it being presented in your face the moment you wake up out of bed. Referring to folks so addicted it's the first thing they grab, see all the notifications, and are back at it by morning time.

For newspapers, it was relatively easy to see and compare the content of the different papers side by side.

I am not sure how I would jump out of my social media news bubble.

They don't directly tickle the reward center of the brain like social media does, cf. e.g. "Brain anatomy alterations associated with Social Networking Site (SNS) addiction" [0].

This is by design, btw, cf. e.g. "Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity " [1]; not itself a primary source but it seems to be well received.

My point being, it's like cigarettes with a message. The message being divisive in all likelihood, in order to override rationality with emotion and increase engagement. [2]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5362930/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Madness-Driving-Crisis-Restor...

[2] How social media shapes polarization: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cHDXsRpzZ84svIv5L-7tfnOvJ-p...

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