Comment by euroderf
1 day ago
Thanks to social media and AI, the cost of inundating the mediasphere with a Big Lie (made plausible thru sheer repetition) has been made much more affordable now. This is why the administration is trumpeting lower prices!
> has been made much more affordable now
So more democratized?
I think you mean "more capitalized" or "more financialized" or "the realm of the wealthy" because scale is based on money, not the platonic ideal 1:1 ratio of persons to democratic power.
Media is "loudest volume wins", so the relative affordability doesn't matter; there's a sort of Jevons paradox thing where making it cheaper just means that more money will be spent on it. Presidential election spending only goes up, for example.
No, those with more money than you can now push even more slop than they could before.
You cannot compete with that.
So if I had enough money I could get CBS news to deny the Holocaust? Of course not. These companies operate under government license and that would certainly be the end of it through public complaint. I think it suggests a much different dynamic than most of this discussion presumes.
In particular, our own CIA has shown that the "Big Lie" is actually surprisingly cheap. It's not about paying off news directors or buying companies, it's about directly implanting a handful of actors into media companies, and spiking or advancing stories according to your whims. The people with the capacity to do this can then be very selective with who does and does not get to tell the Big Lies. They're not particularly motivated by taking bribes.
CBS news, probably not, because that would materially alter its brand/brand value. An equally high-reach platform on the political fringe? Sure!
Billionaires are buying up and consolidating all of the media outlets just as a hobby, I'm sure.
Does government licensed mean at the pleasure of the president? The BBC technically operates at the pleasure of the King
> So if I had enough money I could get CBS news to deny the Holocaust? Of course not.
You absolutely could. But wouldn't be CBS news, it would be ChatGPT or some other LLM bot that you're interacting with everywhere. And it wouldn't say outright "the holocaust didn't happen", but it would frame the responses to your queries in a way that casts doubt on it, or that leaves you thinking it probably didn't happen. We've seen this before (the "manifest destiny" of "settling" the West, the whitewashing of slavery,
For a modern example, you already have Fox News denying that there was no violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. And look how Grokipedia treats certain topics differently than Wikipedia.
It's not only possible, it's likely.