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FINTEL's avatar

This is the problem of media; they know that people read only a headline and a few words or the first graph and move on. It sticks in their head and nothing else comes of it. You could write headlines all day and publish and few would read anything else other than that. You could fill the article with graphs of words about monkeys, birds or flying pigs and no one would even know the article was about that.

It’s almost as if media can create false alternate realities based on headlines alone and fill each article with subject matter that’s completely off the topic and few would notice it. They count on these low quality pieces gaining traction as clickbait so they can sell ads. They couldn’t care less about any authenticity.

And this is the information space we all live in where few can counter it because it’s so pervasive that it’s hard to get the signal above the noise they’ve created.

Your piece should be a lead that people should read, instead were driven to believe pieces that have zero validity gaining major traction because they have built in traffic that overwhelms the truth.

Things like polling numbers heralded as real too early in the game using dubious research are another example of how media benefits those who pay them to sound phony alarms, ie, red waves coming, so and so is too old, etc.

The ease of influence operations in such a landscape are why many are able to get away with it so much. IRA type operations are not just in Russia, they are everywhere a campaign for xyz is needed.

Great work as always. Look forward to more of this work as the coming year brings us to the brink of insanity -- or so that wish us to believe. It’s a war not for the hearts, but for the minds.

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ryan fae's avatar

Fantastic article!

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