Part 2 - A Citizen’s Guide to the Evolution of Political Persuasion
Dark Patterns and the New Propaganda
Lies will travel 10 miles before truth has time to put its boots on. An old adage but the tools of deception have never been more powerful and destructive. We live in an era of information silos, of message manipulation by design and by algorithm, of rage farming, disinformation, and dissemination of hate as the profit engines on US-based social media platforms, and of unhinged hourly propaganda from the Trump regime. The Pledge for Canada addresses these issues starting with today’s cross-post of part 2 (« Dark Patterns and the New Propaganda ») in a series from the highly recommended @ALetterFromAMaritimer on Substack. On Wednesday, we explore the new journalism of fact-checking and lie rebuttal. On Friday, we look at efforts underway to create publicly-owned social media platforms. -
In Part 1, we traced the historical arc from the town square to the digital feed and from open civic dialogue to an era of engineered persuasion. We saw how political communication has moved away from open public conversations and into tightly controlled digital spaces where algorithms shape what we see based on what will trigger the stronge…
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