Read on Twitter
I'm fairly young, so I dont feel comfortable calling myself an "expert," but as someone who has written formal media criticism for almost 2 years, I can tell you this naive faith in lies being easily disprovable and therefore not sticking in public consciousness is dead wrong. https://twitter.com/Mihlii1/status/1345765573859409922
This is very similar to John Stuart Mill's famous arguments for "Free Speech" found in *On Liberty*, where an oversimplified version of it can be summed up as "censorship is always bad because it could potentially prevent someone from learning the truth about something"
On some level, this is obviously true, but Mill's argument (that even people who havent read it seem to subconsciously know and believe), depended a lot on a naive optimism in the truth's ability to prevail over lies in a sort of "marketplace of ideas" in the public
To Mill, "freedom of speech" is supposed to be a sort of guarantor of the truth taking a predominant hold in public consciousness, as long as we dont interfere in the "marketplace of ideas" (modern idiom, not sure if it's used in Mill's book since I haven't read it in years)
But I think the US is the best case study that refutes Mill's naive optimism. For one thing, Mill doesn't adequately deal with the fact that some people have a disproportionate amount of say and reach than others (like oligarchs using their media outlets as megaphones)
What I've found is that sheer repetition and the ubiquity of a perspective/narrative, and not its truthfulness, are what controls public consciousness. This is very easy to achieve in the US when 90% of the media Americans consume is controlled by 5-6 big for-profit corporations
