I wanted to make a topic on this generally because it's something close to my heart (and my blood pressure) and seems to only be growing as the days and years go on in impact and influence.

I don't know that there's anything that can be done about it except continuing to hold awareness and be sceptical about things.

I feel like broadly this site is one of the few places online nowadays that isn't completely overrun by bad faith arguing and frankly what feels like unrealistic and unnatural lines of argument. Everyone here still feels like a real person which can't be said for other online spaces, comment sections etc.

Maybe I should withdraw from some of those other places but something in me can't let it go when misinformation and implication are being spread about deliberately to mislead or control people.

It just feels so unfair though that people wouldn't just honestly promote their own ideology and let people decide for themselves, instead they would deliberately lie to win. (For example about immigration, crime, minorities in general, poverty, what they plan to spend the budget on, etc.)

Where censorship comes into it is with things like rules governing what you can and can't say, written by people who give a pass to the propagandists.

So for example on reddit, a journalist can post a racist article, and people can comment on what's in that article, agreeing, as long as in their comments they don't use explicit racial slurs. But if somebody calls them out for doing so, ah, that is 'making a personal attack' which is against the rules. So, the rules are thus implicitly pro racism through the politics of politeness. Rinse and repeat through other minorities.

I think what frustrates me is that the letter of the rule in a lot of places now means that you can't say anything grossly offensive in an obvious way, but that isn't taken in most places further into the spirit that you shouldn't be offensive or be harmful, so now we are in the place as a society or within institutions where somebody speaking using strong words to express themself is viewed as 'worse' than something like deliberate insidious portrayal of an entire category or group of people as malicious or harmful based on lies or information deliberately taken out of context.

And that now extends into how people self-censor on social media and express themselves irl as well.

I dislike all forms of censorship. I like everything to be laid out as it is and then you make the judgment call.

It’s insane how easy people fall for dumb shit posted online. Although intentional online propaganda has existed since the very beginning of the internet and methods have only advanced.

The scariest part is how the far-right across the entire world are targeting young people through social media and it’s working very well. This is creating such long-lasting damage that (sorry for being too pessimistic) I don’t think we won’t be able to get out of for decades, if at all given the climate damage happening in the meantime.

Germany is becoming scarier and scarier to live in as more and more literal nazis are not afraid to speak out and gather at events like pride. Very ironic how the nazi themes are such a taboo here, yet a literal fascist party is getting such big support.

Edited September 18Sep 18 by pavi

I think what I find annoying also is how many people seem to have studied and learned about WWII in school and as an adult and yet come away with the understanding "WWII and the Holocaust were bad specifically because Germans were targeting based on ethnicity and creating untrue and misleading rumours about Jewish people and that is always wrong", instead of understanding that why it was wrong was because a group that sought total power was deliberately doing that to a minority group that was unable to defend itself and that THAT is what should be ensured to never happen again.