>> If someone incites hatred against ethnic groups on facebook you can respond and reach the readers of the original post.
> "Just tell people that racism is bad"
What do you think "inciting ethnic hatred" means? Telling people that ethnic hatred is good? So that the only possible reply is that actually ethnic hatred is bad? No it involves conspiracy theories about an ethnic group, accusations against them, in short, empirical statements that can be refuted.
They can be contradicted, but it's very hard to definitively refute them in a way that will convince somebody who wishes to believe it. Even people without a stake in it will often conclude, "I heard X, I heard Y, sounds to me like it could go either way." If anything, they're taken in by how short and empirical those statements are: it makes them seem more true because after all, if it were false I'd see the evidence myself.
There is no statement of fact so definitive that it can overcome a vast barrage of inflammatory conspiracy theory. If that's done in front of a crowd looking for a simple solution to their problems, they'll pay no attention to refutation of "short, empirical statements".
I'm not so sure it is, when there are so many well-funded, concerted efforts to deliberately induce ignorance in people. Radio and books have at least some bottleneck where you can at least try to cut off deliberate falsehoods.
Obviously that doesn't always work, but social media makes it effectively impossible. Not only do you have official sources of propaganda, you live in a swamp of anecdotes that are impossible to refute or contextualize. The radio says "Group X is bad", and you yourself may never have had any trouble with X, but a flood of "X did [bad-thing] to me" stories on social media can make you think that you've got personal exposure to it.
Ultimately, I believe the problem rests with the individuals who are willing to be manipulated. The human organism has a massive security hole that has been very well exploited, and I've got no idea how to patch it. No amount of coherent, cogent argument will change the mind of somebody bent on having a target to hate, and people have gotten very good at insinuating those targets.
> I'm not so sure it is, when there are so many well-funded, concerted efforts to deliberately induce ignorance in people. Radio and books have at least some bottleneck where you can at least try to cut off deliberate falsehoods.
I don't see how you can believe these things at the same time. If these efforts to induce ignorance are indeed so well-funded and concerted, how can bottlenecks be an obstacle? Indeed why couldn't these well-funded, concerted efforts use those bottlenecks to cut off people disagreeing with them?
I meant to suggest that if you have a few large, expensive propaganda organs, you have some hope of running your own counterpropaganda campaign: disprove it at the source, and maybe you can convince people.
Of course if the money can shut you down entirely, you can't succeed. But it's hard to completely control radio and books. It can be done, but only by making your totalitarianism clear. It's more effective if people think they came to their conclusions on their own, and have been exposed to "all sides".
Today, they can bolster their organized propaganda with a sufficiently effective astroturf campaign (magnified by social media). The two provide confirmation for each other, and appear to be independent. They may even actually be independent; they don't need to formally coordinate if they roughly agree on the ends.
So people believe they're getting "all sides" of the story, and there's no need to shut down disagreement. Instead, people hear the message from two sources that affirm each other, and disregard any disagreement willingly.
> "Just tell people that racism is bad"
What do you think "inciting ethnic hatred" means? Telling people that ethnic hatred is good? So that the only possible reply is that actually ethnic hatred is bad? No it involves conspiracy theories about an ethnic group, accusations against them, in short, empirical statements that can be refuted.