Wow, you guys are a lot more optimistic than me.
Back when I was still on Facebook, it drove me insane how many people would post stories without taking one second to verify. They all know fake news is happening, but if a story meets their preconceptions about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, they don't say "That sounds too good/bad to be true." They just post.
mitigated by our knowledge that it exists.
So LM, when you say "our knowledge," I'll assume you mean you, Brad and RC... not "people" or "Americans"
2nd- & 3rd-world citizenry where they're far less informed/educated
In my experience, the elderly are 3rd world citizens in this respect. Judging from my parents' and in-laws' inboxes, their friends are constantly sending groundless dire warnings around through email. Most of us here can recognize the fake email:
"researchers at [famous institution or corporation] have determined that [benign everyday practice] is linked to [grave illness]"
But 25 years later, they still work.
There's another phenomenon at work too - the illusory truth effect. Simply put, it is the fact that the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe it to be true. This is true even when you have prior knowledge that the claim is false.
-
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth -
http://metro.co.uk/2015/12/01/if-you-repeat-a-lie-enough-people-think-its-true-5536488/ -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect -
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dont-believe-lies-just-people-repeat/Another problem is that "true" and "false" apply to statements, not things. In other words, if I say "People on welfare are perfectly capable of holding down jobs, they just don't want to," you can gather evidence, run studies and verify or falsify that claim (and most likely have some level of conflicting evidence to argue both sides, but there are grounds for debate).
On the other hand, when I repeatedly show you an image of a African-American woman on welfare sitting on her porch in the middle of the day, I implicitly make the argument that welfare recipients are mostly African-Americans who sit around doing nothing all day. I use this particular example because that is the imagery that Reagan used to effect a shift in the way people perceived welfare by creating the icon of the "welfare queen."
Point being that imagery is much harder to argue with than textual statements. In other words, you can have an image that is "true" (that really is a welfare abuser sitting on the porch all day while decent jobs and adequate day care for her kids exist). And even though the implied generalization isn't true (welfare recipients are mostly black and lazy), the imagery evokes that association in a way that is unstated and therefore not directly debatable. The person promoting the image can always just say "I never said that" which he didn't. He implied it. He can even say "You're being racist for generalizing from one picture" and turn it around on you.
So those two factors
- illusory truth
- the implied associations in imagery
Are why I say this is going to be bad. It's going to be bad in the third world, the second world and the first world.
It's even going to be bad for those of us in this group, relatively savvy though we may be, because it will be hard to "unsee" the videos and in our minds, we will have that imagery and that person saying those things. When the text of the video corresponds with our prejudices, it will create associations for us in our minds that will be hard to undo.
I would like to believe that I'm too smart and sophisticated to fall for it, but 40 years of psychology research (since the 1977 experiments) and 80 years of "scientific" propaganda (since Goebbels) suggests I'm not.
