Facebook continues to claim they oppose discrimination in all forms, in spite of mountains of evidence showing they continue to discriminate based on age, gender and other attributes in their ad platform.
“A good cause makes a lie easier to buy”. This is why many propaganda campaigns use themes such as “for the children” – even though their claims are exaggerated or not true. The target buys the propaganda message since its for a good cause.
Third party companies offer to install solar PV arrays on your home and promise to save you money on your monthly electric utility costs. Bloomberg found they use a mix of false assertions, lies, cherry picking and fear as sales methods, to persuade homeowners to sign up and lease the solar PV system for decades. Over time, the lease costs increase such that the homeowner spends far more in the future, while the third party company collects large government subsidies. Few homeowners understand what they got in to. When they go to sell their home, the lease is transferred to the buyer – in effect, TPO solar PV arrays become a dead weight on the home’s future sales potential, particularly to informed buyers who understand the game.
Glassdoor is a web site where workers write reviews of their employer and work environment. Not surprisingly, many companies are gaming the system, flooding it with 5-star reviews.
Social media is the new battleground. It’s being used to push people over the edge, to threaten violence against others, and in some cases, leading to actual violence. A controversial video clip that spread online in the past day was pushed by what appears to have been a fake account.
Facebook employees write 5-star reviews of Facebook products sold on Amazon.
In 2012, an editor for The Oregonian newspaper died of a heart attack. The paper printed his obituary citing his wonderful career, awards and track record. Left out of the story was the married editor died in the arms of his prostitute, a fact which another editor deliberately covered up.
The surprising observation that “medium confidence” in a scientific finding means we have no confidence at all and high confidence means we have only moderate evidence and medium consensus.
USA Today publishes a headline saying the world’s oceans are “boiling”. Seriously?
A “star” reporter and editor at Der Spiegel has admitted to fabricating his stories over a period of many years. He was the four time winner of Germany’s “Reporter of the Year” award and a two time winner of CNN’s Journalist of the Year. Yet the journalists who selected the winner never saw problems. Think of the role that such fake news plays in shaping public opinion, and its sharing on social media as part of propaganda campaigns.
Facebook, in spite of all its public lies public comments about privacy, was giving away our personal data including access to private messages to big tech companies like Bing, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Yahoo.
Propaganda messaging played and continues to play an enormous role in the public’s view on the Affordable Care Act a.k.a. ObamaCare. For example, Democrats have made pre-existing condition exclusions the centerpiece of their 2018 public commentary on the ACA.
Yet, never explained is that most Americans already had protections against pre-existing condition exclusions – it was the individual market that did not have protections (details in the post). Further, contrary to what you have been led to believe, the ACA does, in fact, establish a pre-existing condition waiting period. The ACA did not eliminate pre-existing condition waiting periods (see post for details).
The propaganda messaging used the methods of Fear, Assertion, Lying and What You See Is All There Is and has been extraordinarily effective. The Republican opposition has been clumsy and largely counterproductive with utterly ineffective propaganda messaging of its own.
(This is a major update to a previously posted item on this topic – formatting, editing and a better explanation of the propaganda methods used have been done to improve the previous post and make it easier to understand.)
Revisiting the old Occupy Democrats propaganda poster from 2016, where nearly every item on the poster was an outright lie. I recently updated the “free childcare” section and added Parts 7 and 8 to this popular series. Seriously, it is the most searched for item on this blog!
In light of the survey finding most voters are badly misinformed on well known and popular public policy issues the same is likely true about social media posts. It is likely that more than half of political or policy oriented social media posts are incorrect. But depending on who makes the posts, and how many followers they have, their incorrect posts can be influential – and plant non factual and illogical constructions in the minds of their targets.