modern propaganda works by getting you to believe nothing. It's like lowering the defenses of your immune system. If they can get you to believe that all the news is propaganda, then all of a sudden propaganda from foreign-controlled state media or sourceless loony toon rants from domestic kooks, are all on an equal playing field with real investigative journalism. If everything is fake, your news consumption is just a dietary choice. And it's different messages for different audiences - carefully tailored. To one audience they say all news is fake, to those who are on their way to conversion they say "Trust only these sources." To those who might be open to skepticism, they just say "Hey isn't it troubling that the media is a business?"

Hannah Arendt, who studied all the different fascist movements (not just the Nazis) noted that:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Does that remind you of any subreddits?

The famous French philosopher Sartre had this to say about the futile task of arguing with a certain group in his time. See if any of this sounds familiar to you

____ have chosen hate because hate is a faith to them; at the outset they have chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease they feel as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions appear to them. If out of courtesy they consent for a moment to defend their point of view, they lend themselves but do not give themselves. They try simply to project their intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse.

Never believe that ______ are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The ____ have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.

They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. If then, as we have been able to observe, the ____ is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.

He was talking about arguing with anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators in the 1940s. But of course this style of arguing is only too familiar to anyone who has seen what has happened to Reddit over the past 2 years. Ever see someone post something that is quite completely false, with a second person posting a long reply with sources, only to have the original poster respond "top kek, libcuck tears"? One side is talking about facts but the other is playing what Sartre calls the game of discourse. The other side is liberated from having to mean anything or defend anything.

Just look at the very image meme that started this thread.

"Fake News."

This is a word or phrase that was born about six weeks ago. It lived for about two weeks as a genuine English word, meaning headlines fabricated from nothing to get viral clicks from Facebook; political clickbait engineered by SEO wizards who weren't even American, just taking advantage of the election news wave:

• "You Won't Believe Obama's Plan To Declare Martial Law!"

• "Hillary Has Lung, Brain, Stomach, And Ass Cancer - SIX WEEKS TO LIVE!"

For a while, it seemed like the real world could agree that a word existed and had meaning, that it referred to a thing. Then the word was promptly murdered. Now, as we can clearly see, anyone who disagrees with a piece of news - even if it is NEWS, not an editorial - feels free to call it "Fake News." In fact there is a two step process. First, one assumes that all news is agenda-driven and editorial (this was already achieved for many heavily propagandized Americans by the mid-2000s). Second, all news that is embarrassing to your side must be editorial and fabricated. The enemy is just making things up constantly, a never ending churn of lies.

So who is the culprit? Who murdered the definition of fake news? A group of people who don't care what words mean. The concept that some news is fake and some news is not was intolerable. It required an objective distinction between positive and negative. A distinction between those who act in good faith and sometimes screw up and those who act in bad faith and never intended to do any good. A distinction between the traditional journalistic practices of off-the-record sourcing and the novel journalistic practice of saying every lie you can think of in the hope one sticks. A distinction between valuing our democracy and our institutions, and seeking to overturn and destroy them. But the group of people I'm talking about cannot tolerate these distinctions. Their worldview is unitary. They are a liberated nothingness and the enemy is everything. They make all words mean "bad" and they make all words mean "the enemy" because their only focus is to discredit and destroy. In the end they will only need one word.

Source : https://np.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/5ntjh2/all_this_fake_news/dceozzo