Comment by grotorea
2 years ago
> The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinion about institutions they don’t have direct interaction with.
I don't get why the author says this, confidence dropped for everyone. Who is doing this successful propaganda?
And one interesting quote from the linked survey
> Finally, the drops in American confidence may be merely harbingers of wider shifts across the globe, where these companies already operate and where the majority of their future growth is expected to arise. In a special report addended to their annual Trust Barometer, Edelman found that while technology remained the most trusted industry, 14 of their 22 sampled markets around the globe had reported drops in trust in tech companies since the year previous.8 While the U.S. experienced the largest drop, it was followed closely behind by most of the advanced democracies. In these countries, respondents also reported adopting new technology at a much lower level than in countries where tech confidence was higher. This is deeply problematic for companies whose rare new innovations require large-scale adoption to be profitable.
There are several different things going on in that poll, but nothing specifically points at propaganda as a cause of loss of trust.
For public companies, the loss is likely just observable behavior - higher prices, worse service, etc. - and likely the root cause is poor incentive structure - incentivizing executives for short term profits over everything else.
For government, the largest factors are likely (1) the way COVID was handled and (2) the behavior of the US federal government since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Note that this is purely separate from trust in Trump himself, which is its own story but not in the poll. And Congress has always had extraordinarily low trust ratings, so no surprise there.
The press is interesting. Likely there is some propaganda aspect there (I have no data but half the country detests the "mainstream media", sometimes with good cause). But I think that the main issue is likely that many press outlets have come out as naked partisans in the last decade.
The main takeaway I got from this was that arguments from authority are going to be especially ineffective moving forward, no one is going to grant you credibility because of your position as government/press/scientist/doctor/whatever, because people have been abused too many times. And it will take decades to rebuild trust in existing institutions, and won't happen at all without significant transparency and reform.
> > The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinion about institutions they don’t have direct interaction with.
> I don't get why the author says this, confidence dropped for everyone.
I stopped a little to think, and my answer is:
Exactly. It wasn't what I started out with but I think it is a main takeaway:
Our entire web of trust is torn apart.
> Who is doing this successful propaganda?
Our enemies. But they are being smart and lucky. As the Ukrainian meme goes: "we are lucky they are so #%$&@ stupid".
Only here we are the stupid ones and russian and Chinese are the smart ones.
They play both sides of BLM. They play both GOP and DEMs.
They play anti-vaxxers - and get enourmous help from big tech ham fistedly like no others trying to help authorities in a way that even I as a vaccinated and boosted person find crazy.
(What could they have done instead of trying to shut down discussion? It would probably have done wonders if tech execs and politicians had instead shown up in the regular queues for vaccinations. Adult Norwegians still know the reference about the King on the tram during the oil crisis half a century later.)
Media in its chase for clicks also help them, tearing apart again and again trying to make sensations out of everything.
It's certainly been a popular story in the press for many years now, but I remain skeptical.
What percentage of the comprehensive causal chain do you attribute to foreign propaganda versus it simply being various domestic phenomena, and upon what do you base your calculations?
> What percentage of the comprehensive causal chain do you attribute to foreign propaganda versus it simply being various domestic phenomena, and upon what do you base your calculations?
I am no social scientist.
I am just an observer.
I observe society getting worse in certain ways, better in others.
The main observation is probably that Russia has been caugth funding both BLM groups and anti BLM groups.