Comment by jongjong

It's totally not true that only a small number of people are spreading all the contrarian ideas online.

I remember where was some media coverage about 'The disinformation dozen' during COVID; what a load of rubbish. How can anyone believe this? In a world with billions of people connected to the internet, only 12 are spreading disinformation? This is impossible. There are surely at least 100 North Korean agents working full time being paid to spread non-stop disinformation... This is a really conservative guess. Now do that for every country who have a beef against the west you probably have tens of thousands of people being paid to spread disinformation. Then you probably have thousands of people spreading disinformation as a way to promote their books... Then you probably have millions of institutional insiders spreading various bits of contrarian information once in a while (which would be mislabeled as disinformation). It's not a small number of people either way. It's a LOT of people... Suggesting that it's only 12 people is comically wrong! I'm sorry but if you ever believed that, you need to adjust your worldview because you've been living in a bubble. It's not only physically impossible statistically, it's literally impossible to measure so you'd be wrong just for accepting any fixed number (let alone a tiny number)...

The mainstream view is a simplified view and so there will always be people who can see fundamental flaws in parts of the mainstream argument because they have deeper knowledge on certain aspects than a journalist has. Mainstream news is written by journalists, they never know quite as much as the insiders. So anytime a news article is published, there will be a small number of people out there who know the full story and they will be surprised at the discrepancies between the story and their first-hand experience of it. If you're an expert in anything, it's likely a matter of time before you come across some media story about your field which you know doesn't quite correspond to reality. Once you experience that, it makes you doubt all media coverage of other fields too. It's just a fact that the media isn't fully accurate. It doesn't matter how reputable the organization is; they have a near monopoly so this allows them to add a lot of spin and make a lot of 'mistakes'.