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 4chan, but when you do all of that, who's to say these people aren't still going to try to start a pogrom based on an in-person rumor?
Yes obviously personality is itself in large part formed by social circumstances and we can handwave away that the new soviet man will have no such people - but that still gives you 80 years of 20-40% of the population having deeply reactionary instincts!
>>785549>this kind of content is supply-lead versus demand lead"is NOT supply lead, versus demand lead." obviously.
>>785549>What is to be done about this?>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?- Firm, but unemotional push back, with cited sources. If the schizo responds by claiming
<hurr durr propaganda<hurr durr unreliable and/or biased sources<hurr durr shill!etc.
You do not respond because they're merely trying to get you heated. The moment you elicit any emotional response, you've lost.
- You can't persuade the unwilling, so don't try. Say your piece in as cold and calculating a manner as possible and move on. Since you can't know with whom you're interacting, and whether or not they're legitimately possessed by some extremist belief system or they're merely being deliberately provocative, you can't assume that they're even willing to having their mind persuaded. However, there is always the lurker, the disengaged spectator, to whom you can address your points, in the hopes that they may be persuaded in convincing enough fashion. If you receive direct questions, you may or may not answer, depending on how much time you've got to spare, as long as you do so in as an emotionally neutral manner as possible.
That's really it, with the added addendum that you should know when to disengage, and when not to even bother wasting your time. For instance, there's no point going to 4chan/pol/ to try and assuage anyone with your talking points, they have a very narrow definition of what constitutes acceptable material, so don't even try. You'll just get banned for shitposting/spam/whatever bullshit most likely. When you interact with others in a more neutral setting, you can push back, but the problem is that it often requires a lot of effort unless you're already prepared with a sort of canned response in the same way that these sort of /pol/yps are prepared with retarded sophistry alongside a folder full of incendiary and highly deceptive and emotionally charged propaganda in the form of charts and data points and statistical breakdowns and other such bullshit that reaffirm the biases they'd very much like to perpetuate.
At least, this is how I operate, but I don't waste time in social media spaces like X or Facebook or whatever, I'm 100% an anonymous user on various webring imageboards, so this is how I have adapted to that sort of environment.