DW’s Washington bureau chief Ines Pohl, starting at 5 minutes in.
Entry point:
“This was about hearts and minds, if I can put it that way, he hit lots of emotional points, that particularly hit home to americans, he tailored that speech to his audience.”
“Absolutely, ah, ah Phil. He really understands, how to reach a specific audience, I mean - we mustn’t forget, he is a trained comedian [?], and he really knows how -, kind of, you know, which buttons to push to reach, as you say - the hearts and minds of the audience, and he did so - I mean, just by invoking all the tragedies in the american history, like the attack on Perl Harbor, or the 9/11 terrorist attack, with these - images - he invoked in the speech, he didn’t only reach out to the lawmakers and politicians, but also to every single american, and on top of that, he played this - very emotional, ah, video, so he also understands, how to use images. So in a way that was a very, very - modern [?] speech, we just heard from president Selenskyj.”
Advanced course -
Meta Platforms (FB.O) will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.
Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in New Delhi and Elizabeth Culliford in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Stephen Coates, Shri Navaratnam and Kim Coghill
src: click
Now retracted:
Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, now says users cannot share posts calling for the death of Russian president Vladimir Putin or other heads of state after all.
The move came as Russia’s ban on Instagram came into effect on Monday, blocking access to the social media platform for some 80 million users across the country.
Meta’s latest policy, detailed in an internal company post seen by Reuters, marks a U-turn from a previous decision that was said to temporarily allow some posts on Facebook and Instagram calling for the death of Putin or his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko.
“We are now narrowing the focus to make it explicitly clear in the guidance that it is never to be interpreted as condoning violence against Russians in general,” Meta global affairs president Nick Clegg wrote on Sunday in a post on the company’s internal platform that was seen by Reuters.
“We also do not permit calls to assassinate a head of state…So, in order to remove any ambiguity about our stance, we are further narrowing our guidance to make explicit that we are not allowing calls for the death of a head of state on our platforms,” Clegg said.
src: click
Background:
[Walter] Lippman argues that, when properly deployed in the public interest, the manufacture of consent is useful and necessary for a cohesive society, because, in many cases, “the common interests” of the public are not obvious except upon careful analysis of the collected data, a critical intellectual exercise in which most people are uninterested or are incapable of doing. Therefore, most people must have the world summarized for them by the well-informed, and will then act accordingly.
That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.… [a]s a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.… Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.
— Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Chapter XVThe political elite are members of the class of people who are incapable of accurately understanding, by themselves, the complex “unseen environment” wherein the public affairs of the modern state occur; thus, Lippmann proposes that a professional, “specialized class” collect and analyze data, and present their conclusions to the society’s decision makers, who, in their turn, use the “art of persuasion” to inform the public about the decisions and circumstances affecting them.[5]
Public Opinion proposes that the increased power of propaganda and the specialized knowledge required for effective political decisions have rendered the traditional notion of democracy impossible. The phrase “manufacture of consent” was introduced, which the academics Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman used as the title of their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Chomsky has extensively criticized Lippman’s thesis as deeply opposed to democracy.
src: click
edit: More background: click
