The famous newspaper journalist H.L. Mencken once said: “To every complex question there is a simple answer—and it's clever, neat, and wrong!"
What social media in the broad sense of media does is to oversimplify complex issues. It’s the X post. It’s that 15 second TicToc video. It’s the headline on an online news site. It’s the talking head reading the news on NPR radio. It’s the tagline on cable news.
It’s this oversimplification that often leads people to incorrect conclusions or solutions. One can say they research the heck out of something, yet conclude the opposite of what’s really going on. All causes today have their hactivists online 24 hours a day trying to convince you of something that will help their cause and their cause almost always involve more power, control over people, and financial gain.
Looking at history, Edward Bernays, known as the "father of public relations,” is considered a pioneer in applying psychological techniques to advertising. He used his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to influence consumer behavior. He convinced a generation of women that smoking a cigarette was “cool.”
Isn’t social media today just Bernay’s print and TV advertising on steroids.
The “Big Lie” is the name of a propaganda technique, originally coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, who says “The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” The technique involves a known falsehood that is stated and repeated as if it is self-evidently true, in the hopes of swaying the course of an argument in a direction that takes the big lie for granted rather than critically questioning it or ignoring it.
Isn’t social media today a place for both big and also small lies to percolate, until some number of people believe them as true?
If one thinks that they can’t be convinced into drawing incorrect conclusions or believing in someone’s unworkable solutions, then they aren’t understanding that decades have been spent inside government, in universities, in think tanks, and in the private sector studying and practicing how to influence the human mind. The reality is that there are plenty of people who believe that their cause justifies any of their means. The real hack today is knowing that we are all susceptible to being 100% wrong on any topic. Thinking otherwise is not well reasoned.
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