Democracy dies in darkness, a line recently adopted by the Washington Post as their slogan, warns us that unless people are informed with facts and truth, no true democracy is possible. Those who benefit from darkness have always tried to control media in order to control and manipulate public opinion with propaganda. Until recently, propaganda has been the exclusive domain of nation-states or state-sponsored actors through mass media [19]. With the mass popularization of the Web in the last two decades and the subsequent privatization of it by big platforms like Google, YouTube and Facebook, the paradigm has changed. Propaganda is no longer a tool of an elite, but it has been commoditized to the extent that it is as accessible as advertisement, becoming a weapon that too many actors have access to. One must appreciate the irony that those most vocal about the risks of propaganda are those who controlled it in the past.
Nevertheless, the risk of fake-news—a neologism created to mitigate cognitive dissonance—cannot be ignored [5, 6, 30, 33, 36]. It is dangerous for a society if people living in it cannot distinguish between facts, opinions and outright misinformation. Although this danger has always existed, today the situation is dire if only because quantitative becomes qualitative and although all information is theoretically available, in practical terms it is not.
Doesn't this seem a bit overblown for what is ultimately just a tool to make soft white lists for search results? I feel like Brave has this habit of framing mundane software as some sort of weapon in a grand ideological war. You're just letting people filter Pinterest out of their search results. Chill.
Democracy dies in darkness, a line recently adopted by the Washington Post as their slogan, warns us that unless people are informed with facts and truth, no true democracy is possible. Those who benefit from darkness have always tried to control media in order to control and manipulate public opinion with propaganda. Until recently, propaganda has been the exclusive domain of nation-states or state-sponsored actors through mass media [19]. With the mass popularization of the Web in the last two decades and the subsequent privatization of it by big platforms like Google, YouTube and Facebook, the paradigm has changed. Propaganda is no longer a tool of an elite, but it has been commoditized to the extent that it is as accessible as advertisement, becoming a weapon that too many actors have access to. One must appreciate the irony that those most vocal about the risks of propaganda are those who controlled it in the past. Nevertheless, the risk of fake-news—a neologism created to mitigate cognitive dissonance—cannot be ignored [5, 6, 30, 33, 36]. It is dangerous for a society if people living in it cannot distinguish between facts, opinions and outright misinformation. Although this danger has always existed, today the situation is dire if only because quantitative becomes qualitative and although all information is theoretically available, in practical terms it is not.
Doesn't this seem a bit overblown for what is ultimately just a tool to make soft white lists for search results? I feel like Brave has this habit of framing mundane software as some sort of weapon in a grand ideological war. You're just letting people filter Pinterest out of their search results. Chill.