Leftists and liberals are fond of the logic that runs as follows: People see right-wing ragebait on twitter or some fake news slop factory, believe it to be true, and are
effectively brainwashed into becoming rightists.
But this runs contrary to the reality: that for the most part this kind of content is supply-lead versus demand lead. e.g. instead of right-wing agitators pushing ragebait on an unwilling public who'd be just as happy to consume normal content, a certain type of consumer is in the market for ragebait. In the 2000s they'd consume Fox News when it would be just as easy to watch another channel, and now that they're online 24/7, Fox News is weaksauce compared to the insane nonsense they can find elsewhere. Instead of acting as a supplier pushing rightoid views on innocent people, it was actually a backstop preventing them becoming completely delusionally detached from reality as most of them have in the Trump years. (Because Fox staff still had to be half-respectable at media gatherings of their class, etc.)
Not understanding this phenomenon is one reason the liberal concern with "fake news" went nowhere. It's based on the assumption of innocent people stumbling upon lies masquerading as truth and "falling for it", when in reality a more accurate model is that people are seeking out an article that validates their pre-existing prejudices and feelings and so obviously prefer to consume fiction to facts.
(An odd outside case is the British press, which for odd institutional reasons was doing fake news in dead tree form. Indeed, no less than a prime minister has once been fairly open about just making shit up when writing anti-EU articles in the 2000s. Why? Because you want people to buy your newspaper! The market encourages you to give the public what they want, and regrettably, they want ragebait and right-wing slop!)
What is to be done about this? As a practical question it makes things much more difficult. If people become right-wing because of a simple mechanistic propaganda apparatus, it's very easy to simply shut it down. But what do you do if people have simply got an underlying personality that is drawn to cruelty, paranoia, a constant sense of unsafety seeking justification and used as justification for supporting violence and hierarchy, and so on? You can shut down all the right-wing press, you can ban all the fake news blogspots, you can IP ban 95% of /v/ and /pol/ from 4cha
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