Sligthly off topic but I think this actually may be some kind of Mandela effect, because I think a large number of people actually think the commercial said ‘You wouldn’t download a car’ because of all the memes but it actually said ‘You wouldn’t steal a car’
In Europe we have public news broadcasters in every country, so relying on corporate news isn’t a huge problem.
Anyway, a news outlet pushing propaganda and misinformation is not nearly as dangerous as a social media platform doing it via algorithm. The fact that the algorithm can give you exactly the kind of propaganda that will resonate with you is extremely dangerous.
Not saying privately owned news outlets with a huge reach aren’t a problem, they definetely are, it’s just a whole other dimension.
Corellation is not causation but in this case it is very suspicious and studies like these show that there might be causation That’s why I said it’s not proof but needs to be studied further.
And yes, of course I mean centralized, profit driven social media. But that is the overwhelming majority of social media.
Well put, this is exactly the problem. I remember the early days of facebook, twitter and instagram when there were no algorithms and your feed was just posts by people you follow in chronological order. Discourse was much more tame back then. We urgently need stricter laws that regulate these algorithms.
I’m glad this is finally being looked at because I’ve been saying this for years and I feel like the vast majority doesn’t realize how bad this is.
If you look at social media use and the rise of the far right over the last 15 years, they pretty much go hand in hand. Sure, that isn’t proof for anything, but it’s alarming and needs to be studied further.
In Germany, we have safeguards that prevent a single media outlet to gain too much power over controlling the public opinion. We have this for TV stations, news papers etc. Just not social media. Because social media wasn’t even on the horizon when this law was put in place.
I think it’s insane that we just let foreign profit driven companies steer the public opinion and discourse in our society and we finally have to start to heavily regulate them.
Capitalism didn’t used to be like this because it was still developing, but it was always going to become this. Enshitification is not a bug, it’s a feature. Capitalism is supposed to work like this. And when it wasn’t, it was just because it wasn’t there yet, mainly due to technical limitations.