Propaganda is everywhere you look, fed by troll farms and picked up by useful idiots, and it’s an ugly, bubbling morass that our entire country is mired in. Propaganda works. In my last diary, I wrote about how Republicans are excellent at cultural wars, and they’re using cultural wars to further propaganda past an American populace that has lost critical thinking skills, are illiterate, and have been told not to trust the news.
Legacy news consumption is declining on the left. Alternative media consumption is rising on both the left and the right, with different “facts” being told on both sides. Americans like me get onto TikTok and Youtube, scroll to their favorite influencers, and we get further insulated into our silos. We are being methodically torn apart, with no shared set of facts.
I recently shared a video on TikTok about how ludicrous it was that many Republicans believed that children were using kitty litters in their classrooms as bathrooms. The comments rolled in on that video, with a healthy subset of comments belonging to MAGA trumpets (or bots) who swore up and down that their cousin (aunt/sister/brother/teacher) told them that children were indeed using kitty litters as bathrooms in schools.
One commentator said that schools in Massachussetts were doing this, and a public school teacher from Massachussetts piped up in response, saying that no such thing was happening at her school. That commentator said she trusted her cousin more than an actual public school teacher from the same public school system she was decrying against. I was agog, reading these comments, and it made me think back to 2016, when bots on Twitter were pushing conspiracy theories about the Hillary Clinton campaign, and Americans on the left and the right believed what these bots were saying.
These tactics of using bots, fake AI accounts, and influencer networks to push propaganda have further evolved. The only way we can break through this is to keep our language simple, rebut the disinformation, and ask the audience (watching all of this) if they actually believe the lies. If one says yes, in the face of rebuttals, then we have got to point out their inauthenticity and the fake narrative that they’re pushing. And we ourselves must teach media literacy skills to the same audience watching in the process — the same must happen for legacy media and alternative media on the left.
We have to make Americans not just passive observers, but active questioners as well.
