This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy

Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic Finance[1] about a possible "impending crash of the Chinese economy" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen "independent" channels. I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presenters, different channels, same message. Over and over. And over. Reminds me of the "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" clip that edited together dozens of apparently independent local news channels saying the same script, verbatim.[2] You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read? I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something about this kind of thing... [1] In case you're interested: [link] ...and some copy-cats clips I recommend opening in a private tab unless you want to be inundated with even more clones: [link] [link] [link] [link] [2] Entertaining and terrifying: [this video]

> That's complete and utter conspiracy nonsense because control implicates intentions, but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions. In most places the media landscape is a oligopoly [0], even social media doesn't evade that pitfall, only a handful of companies dominate that whole space. And while on social media these companies are not always supplying the content, they are very much the gatekeepers about what kind of content is allowed in the first place and what content they aggregate to whom [1]. That is a very powerful position to be in and the results can be observed for years already with filter bubbles based on extremely warped Overton windows and an increasingly centralized world wide web [2] Giving all kinds of media a blank pass, as not doing so would allegedly be fascism, just trivializes a very real problem. [0] [this video] [1] [link] [2] [link]

All together, everyone! [this video] "This sharing of biased and false news has become all to common on social media" ... say the individual talking heads, all paid by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households. You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society. "Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).

This line of argumentation is always so strange to me because it supposes a strange sort of emotional fragility in the rich that I can't quite square with the exceptionalism we allllll know they possess. You think the dominant narrative is that America is a racist hellscape? No, no; America is the greatest country on the planet. I heard it on the news. Surely the increasingly consolidated media, owned by the emotionally-fragile rich, could address the dominance of that narrative? Failure to come together to address such a horrifying distortion of reality, after all, would be extremely dangerous to our democracy[0]. In seriousness, I think that your conclusion that the rich are leaving because of culture-war issues is unsupported by the assertion that the dominant narrative is that Murica sucks. The dominant narrative is that America is the land of the free, dude. Unpleasant realities like Trump profiting from the Secret Service having to stay at his hotels, or the dynastic nature of Presidential politics, or how the IRS goes after the poor for lack of the funding that hitting the big-time cheats would require, or how three of the most recent dynasties had ties to an infamous pedophile, or how that pedophile "killed himself" while in high-profile protective custody -- it's all unimportant. Propaganda both subtle and gross smooths things over. The Pledge of Allegiance seems very, very strange to many other cultures, especially Western ones. I think it's far more likely that the