So, for example, the Tiananmen square thing. Every once in a while, you see stormfront people go crazy on it, saying shit like “fuck the CCP, can’t censor me”. I had been a reddit user for a long time before I moved on to here so I used to see those “awareness” posts all the time, though I didn’t pay any attention to it much. But now that I’ve been on lemmygrad for a while, it seems to me that things didn’t happen like stormfront made it out to be? The guy in the picture didn’t get harmed? There was no massacre? I’m not knowledgeable about any of this, so if anyone have reputable sources, please point me to it. I’m really curious how you get millions of people to believe in something that didn’t happen at all.
Fantastic write up, it’s easy to debunk a lot of the nonsense the press says, but it’s rare that we directly talk to people about why they say things like this. Muddying the issue and forcing us to constantly be on the “defensive” with regards to AES is a very common tactic to prevent actual discourse and explanation. But this cut right through it to be very clear about why these sorts of stories propagate.
I’ll be keeping this in mind in the future, far too often I get dragged into explaining an event did not happen as is popularly understood, and can even get people to understand that the press lied about it, but a week later the other person will return with a new fabricated story. I’m cutting the weeds off at the top, instead of removing them entirely, which is what your write up does.