In the U.S., rich people and political organizations are actually buying or setting up real newspapers in small towns so that when they post fake news on social media, they can reference a dead tree "news source" that is actually their own P.R. machine.
There have been a few articles about it in the real press (NYT, etc) over the last couple of years.
This is no different from the majority of US history. Partisan/slanted news outlets have been a thing in the US going back to the Revolution, on both sides of the aisle. It's often a reason why larger cities had multiple papers. One for each side.
As far as I can tell (from the other side of the Atlantic) most Americans seem to think that the Republican versus Democrat party system is provided for by either the constitution or god, or perhaps both, and that any deviation from two party politics is just that: deviation.
> This is no different from the majority of US history.
It is very different. I and many reading have been here for the time when it didn't happen this way, when the world was not drowning in disinformation.
Turning it into a binary question: 0) It doesn't exist at all, or 1) It exists, makes the question meaningless (and ironically is a common form of misinformation, and technique of disinformation). By binary reasoning, murder exists whether we have law enforcement or not, and cancer always exists so you might as well smoke cigars and work in a coal mine.
But what is the point of saying it's no different? Even if it were true, what do you conclude from that? Why make this argument?
I don't quite follow what that means in context, so I'll answer as if it's asked in isolation:
It's not the same at all. At least, IMHO: The volume of disinformation and misinformation is orders of magnitude greater than ever before, as is capability and quality:
1) Volume: The Internet reduces mass communication costs by orders of magnitude, of course, and similarly reduce wide-area communication costs, so people in Russia and China or anywhere can send disinfo to people in the US or UK or West Africa, etc. Also, computers greatly reduce the cost of producing disinfo, by automating it (and now GPTs reduce that mcuh further).
2) Capability: Before, mass communication required going through narrow gate with a gatekeeper. You had to get it on the evening news broadcast or in the newspaper. The gatekeepers were experts who exercised judgement - not always perfect judgment, but they are less easily fooled than non-experts. Now disinfo can go straight to the consumer (disintermediation). The Soviets, dedicated to decades of expert propaganda to reach westerners, I bet would have thought it was an impossible fantasy to communicate directly to individuals!
3) Quality: Through corporate mass surveillance, collecting data on individuals, tracking responses in detail, A/B testing, etc., the effectiveness of the disinfo can be greatly improved - just like advertising. (I'd be interested to know how much it can be improved.)
