,
12 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Thread: It used to be that free societies had an advantage over unfree societies because of free media. The citizens of dictatorships would try to get access to foreign media. Now the dictatorship just has its own massive media arm and locals can't get access to foreign media.
It's really smart. Many authoritarian regimes have now created their own "progressive" media outlets that only operate abroad and critique foreign countries internally...never critiquing the dictator at home. We know who those media are. And we know how powerful they are
These media are very smart because they hire westerners to appear western and simply tell everyone they can't critique the home country. Nationalist at home, "progressive" abroad.
In general the authoritarian regimes now have the upper hand in media. They also censor social media and get social media forms to work with them. And due to declining free media budgets...the authoritarian-fuax-progressive-abroad media is making many inroads.
Eventually the world will just be made up mostly of state-sponsored nationalist media...broadcasting "progressive" and "critical" messages abroad while at home only highlight how great the country is. Orwellian world is slowly on the way.
Democratic countries could protect themselves through laws proscribing any state media abroad that doesn't also allow criticism at home. For instance if you detain journalists in your country...you don't get to broadcast in a democracy.
Western countries may have to consider if these state nationalist media are actually influence peddling operations...and label them as such, perhaps with a warning on their channels "government propaganda".
It's ridiculous that we have to have all these nationalist media pushing criticism abroad while in their home country banning critique, even pushing "human rights" abroad while abusing them at home.
But governments need legislations also dealing with social media then, because it's strange that foreign powerful governments can create media nationalist arms and use social media as a delivery platform without any critique as to how that works.
You have actual dictatorships that censor social media at home, while charting a media platform to push solely critical messaging abroad. What's happening there? Do we need laws to look deeply into that. Is that "media" or "nationalist advertising" by the country.
And western countries need more transparency about how these government-nationalist media arms operate. Who runs them, where does the money come from. It's not just "freedom of expression" when a country is chartering massively powerful media to influence only people abroad.
It used to be a country, to get its message out, had to work through free media abroad even if it had 'Pravda' at home, now increasingly they all learned "we will just create a massive media platform, it will push nationalism at home and critical voices abroad."
