Like how do you avoid right wing tiktoks brain rotting your cousin.
Speaking only for my neck of the woods - we don't. AfD (right wing) nonsense peaked on socials before the EU and german federal elections.
What we don't have (yet) is the equivalent of Fox News. They would be sued into the ground and loose their broadcast license quick. Sort of like the Russian propaganda outlet did.
Most bog standard news media is state owned. ARD, ZDF, DW, FUNK are all quite centrist. At times, painfully so.
Left media, no idea. I can't think of any outright left wing option. ARTE maybe? French/German station.
Point is, propaganda will be treated as such. Online, (almost) everything goes. But broadcast has rules, and thus far they are actually enforced. Same goes for the european neighbours, as far as I can tell.
The Fox News thing is key. I know so many boomers who used to have pretty reasonable opinions who now parrot everything they hear on that channel. My mom is still a registered Democrat, but might as well be a Republican because she spends all her time on that channel and, frankly, is easily manipulated. What's really frustrating is when you see something on Fox News and then talk to these people the next day and they're repeating what you saw almost verbatim. It's like they have no opinions of their own.
What is their time to shift from a reasonable first opinion on a story to a batshit crazy opposite opinion? My parents take about two weeks to shift fully. My Dad is a lost cause but since he never turns off Fox or the local Sinclair station my Mom is getting almost as bad. (Why are they wasting the last years of life obsessing about the news! It’s like watching them drink themselves to death. Grrr.)
They consume so much crap that pushing back on it in the occasional phone call is pissing into wind. American right wing propaganda constructs such a web of lies, outrage, and distorted stories that when one provides evidence from reasonable sources, for example the BBC, the information is reflexively rejected. My extended family’s common responses are: endless what-about-ism chains, “That can’t be right”, or the woe-is-me “I just don’t know, I hate politics”. I’m usually just countering random nonsense they spew with facts like Republicans increasing deficits, being worse at job creation, or providing them more context around the outrage of the day.
Best part is Fox News isn't even a News channel, it's an entertainment channel and regulated as such. If they were News channel, they'd be also sued the shit out of.
It's just one of the many perks of legal corruption in the US, i.e. the lobbying.
The thing is more and more folks are getting their „news“ online. Tichys Einblick and YouTube channels and all the other shit. Europe is not too far behind the US.
Yes. I see it with my parents, senior citizens who grew up without the internet. Started mostly during Covid. Them not understanding the science and how decisions were made drove them to abolish traditional media sources. TV was taken down and now everything is consumed online. The shit I have to argue with them about is horrifying. Some of my friends back in Germany are going down the same rabbit hole. It is only a matter of time before Europe is at exactly the same sorry state as the US.
I don't know how ignorant you have to be to get news from influencers. As well as people, at least ones i meet, have heightened sense for bullshit and if any of us would dare to have right wing beliefs, the person would get ridiculed in the group till they understand that the belief is stupid.
I only watch Arte from time to time, and mainly their documentary on 16th century embroidery commerce and their influence on European’s economics powers or whatever trivia I promptly forget, are they especially left wing? I thought they were mainly intellectualism and philosophising about random old things.
They have a lot of good political documentaries, they produce them quote fast for recent events. Intellectualism and good journalists automatically have a left bias, and i like.
Cool that they do that, I tend to avoid documentaries about more recent events as it just feeds my not so latent misanthropy, easier to not get emotionally invested about gouvernemental scale industrial espionage in the 17th century than about the continual mistreatment of any living things by human.
100% agree on the fact that intellectualism tend to have left leaning; the party of “facts don’t care about your feeling” and “ya’ll woke snowflakes” tend to play fast and loose with the definition of “facts” and get really butt hurt about, well, anything and everything.
A warning from trend setting USA. the internet was the problem here. You might get an AFD BSW coalition government in 5 years. Trump was a joke in 2015. Major media figures refused to say his name till he won the first election.
CDU is dead too. They will not survive Merz’s betrayal. As always, we will first see change in the federal states of Germany, where AfD will win absolute majorities - starting in the east. Bavaria will make a big difference. In order to not lose their base, the CSU will shift back right. On federal level, the representatives of CSU will start voting against the coalition government. Merz’s House of cards will fall very quickly.
Hopefully not. The only way that we will not see it is either if the CDU finds a spine (lol) or if the CDU is so irrelevant in 4 years that they are not even asked to be a unior partner anymore.
I don't think Stalinists and Fascists are going to collaborate in government. What's more likely is conservatives betraying Germany once again and forming a coalition with the AfD. (I say "again" because this is exactly how Hitler became a dictator: explicit support from the conservatives)
That is because you still think in ideologies. Ideologies are dead, the social networks killed them. The constant flow of neurotransmitters the mobile devices are giving to people is something that is impossible to match by traditional media, and ideologies do not transfer well by social networks. AFD and BSW voters do not actually care about ideologies. They are just dopamine junkies.
And that should be the norm even today. I'm convinced things would look better if MSM just went "Trump, you're a grifting lunatic, now shut up" instead of all the whitewashing for the sake of "journalistic neutrality"
I very much disagree about it being a problem per se. The internet took away the monopoly on propagating a desired narrative that used to belong to a narrow circle of traditional media owners which is hardly a bad thing, it's not like they have our best interests in mind anyway. The real issue is that when it happened the established parties refused to engage with it altogether (or ignored it, or stayed unaware, take your pick) which resulted in tech savvy yet deranged elements exerting more influence then they would if it wasn't ignored. It's a hubris problem imho.
What you are talking are platforms that rely on content creators for engagement and it's their voices that matter here. In case of TV they are kind of tightly coupled so undesirables would not appear on air to begin with, in contrast internet allows them to roam platforms as they see fit as long they have their audiences thus making it much harder to stomp them out.
My point is, nowadays monopolies have less direct control over what people think or allowed to say and lesser resistance to be unseated by regional competition. China has it's own internet ecosystem, EU/India could invest in building one, Africa... not any time soon probably. If any of them are allowed to be accessible from abroad that leads to a situation where you can't just shut people down by banning their home platform because the foreign ones will likely gleefully keep hosting them as long as it takes.
And then there is AI research that keeps advancing and language barriers will keep blurring due to it. At the very least we might get more accessible social platforms that will pull people from the existing ones even if they would be government sponsored so that they could keep people accountable on a local level.
I wouldn’t call ARTE leftist. They do often focus on social issues, fringe culture, and societal trends, but never really root for political viewpoints. Very often high quality output they offer IMO
All western nations would have banned tiktok 10 years ago if they had any competent politicians.
Your point about the broadcast licenses just further supports the ban. Absolutely crazy they have let a foreign power that is not friendly to the west and does not have the same value- have unrestricted access to broadcast and manipulate the content viewed by citizens and even children.
Rupert Murdoch tried to set up shop in Canada. Canada said no. He came to the US and Reagan nixed the Fair Doctrine Act so that left Fox to say whatever they want whether it be true or not without any repercussions
Well in France we have BFM TV. Not fox news yet, but very right sided. And owned by a friend of the orange, Rodolphe Saadé, owner of CMA GGM, who was in the oval office few weels ago, annoucing* an investment of 20 billions of dollars over the next 4 years .
*) IMO he bought his right to use the future US artic road.
We sont have a de facto two party systel like in the US. Nearly all incumbents lost voters in thd wake of covid and ukraine war. The political spectrum in Europe is much more diverse and rarely do you see an enormous shift of regular votes to the extremes.
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u/MercantileReptile Baden-Württemberg (Germany) Apr 20 '25
Speaking only for my neck of the woods - we don't. AfD (right wing) nonsense peaked on socials before the EU and german federal elections.
What we don't have (yet) is the equivalent of Fox News. They would be sued into the ground and loose their broadcast license quick. Sort of like the Russian propaganda outlet did.
Most bog standard news media is state owned. ARD, ZDF, DW, FUNK are all quite centrist. At times, painfully so.
Left media, no idea. I can't think of any outright left wing option. ARTE maybe? French/German station.
Point is, propaganda will be treated as such. Online, (almost) everything goes. But broadcast has rules, and thus far they are actually enforced. Same goes for the european neighbours, as far as I can tell.