If you're old enough, you might remember that as late as the 80s, smoking was still pretty normal in the US. There were still matchbooks and ashtrays on restaurant tables. Then there was an absolutely massive campaign to get people to stop smoking-- I think it may have started in the 90s, but I was a kid then and it wasn't really on my radar. It went into super high gear in the early 2000s, when they were pushing legislation to ban public indoor smoking. Ultimately, I think the legislation was needed, but the campaign around it was completely psychotic-- when educating the public didn't get the desired results, they switched to demonizing, social pressure, early-internet-prototypes of paid media trolling... It was the first time in my adult life I'd really *noticed* propaganda, and AFAICT, it was the first such campaign that was conducted in the internet era, using "social influencer" strategies and troll farms. It's become a template for internet-based propaganda/social campaigns, though they have exciting new tools now-- automated keyword censoring, botnets, that sort of thing.
There's been a similar campaign against "antivaxxers", and it has worked. It has been a bit slower and lower-key, and the pieces of legislation attached to it have mostly failed... but it's there. The paid online social-media trolls/influencers, the spokesdoctors pretending they aren't being paid by drug companies, TV news talking points...
I've seen other smaller, more targeted campaigns around breastfeeding and home/natural childbirth. At that level, there are probably a lot more campaigns going on, and those are just the ones that crossed my radar, because they happened while I was new to motherhood, and still reading in the "mommy sphere". The common thread to all of those things is: if it advocates doing things naturally, and buying fewer commercial products, it's ruthlessly attacked on multiple fronts, with the goal of making anyone advocating such things a guilt-ridden pariah.
To anyone paying attention, the CVAX campaign looked familiar. Same template, same actors, but with more resources backing it, supposedly neutral platforms censoring unapproved info and dissident users, and the volume turned up to deafening.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-29 08:20 pm (UTC)If you're old enough, you might remember that as late as the 80s, smoking was still pretty normal in the US. There were still matchbooks and ashtrays on restaurant tables. Then there was an absolutely massive campaign to get people to stop smoking-- I think it may have started in the 90s, but I was a kid then and it wasn't really on my radar. It went into super high gear in the early 2000s, when they were pushing legislation to ban public indoor smoking. Ultimately, I think the legislation was needed, but the campaign around it was completely psychotic-- when educating the public didn't get the desired results, they switched to demonizing, social pressure, early-internet-prototypes of paid media trolling... It was the first time in my adult life I'd really *noticed* propaganda, and AFAICT, it was the first such campaign that was conducted in the internet era, using "social influencer" strategies and troll farms. It's become a template for internet-based propaganda/social campaigns, though they have exciting new tools now-- automated keyword censoring, botnets, that sort of thing.
There's been a similar campaign against "antivaxxers", and it has worked. It has been a bit slower and lower-key, and the pieces of legislation attached to it have mostly failed... but it's there. The paid online social-media trolls/influencers, the spokesdoctors pretending they aren't being paid by drug companies, TV news talking points...
I've seen other smaller, more targeted campaigns around breastfeeding and home/natural childbirth. At that level, there are probably a lot more campaigns going on, and those are just the ones that crossed my radar, because they happened while I was new to motherhood, and still reading in the "mommy sphere". The common thread to all of those things is: if it advocates doing things naturally, and buying fewer commercial products, it's ruthlessly attacked on multiple fronts, with the goal of making anyone advocating such things a guilt-ridden pariah.
To anyone paying attention, the CVAX campaign looked familiar. Same template, same actors, but with more resources backing it, supposedly neutral platforms censoring unapproved info and dissident users, and the volume turned up to deafening.