this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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There isn't a human on this planet that isn't weak to propaganda.
Yes. The issue is that social democratic states have a general tendency to be very permissive towards propaganda that is hostile to social democracy, because offering a lot of freedom of expression is generally part of the core ideas of social democracy.
This is a problem of any state with freedom of expression, not specific to social democracy. The USA fell victim to it and was never anywhere close to social democracy.
Public education seems to be the best treatment so far, and it's more prevalent in social democratic states. I sincerely hope something more robust can scale someday.
I think that in Social-Democracy the means by which information is spread should not be owned by the Private sector.
In other words, the Press should either be state owned, owned by its workers (i.e. cooperatives), owned by everybody in the area they cover or some other such form of communal ownership were power over it is not approportioned based on wealth.
Like Tolerance, there is a Paradox here were the freedom of Social-Democracy when extended to structures which can be captured by those who gain from having a different system to undermine Social-Democracy through Propaganda, will end up destroying it, so permiting freedom there Social-Democracy ends up delivering less freedom overall (because it gets subverted and eventually destroyed).
Mind you, this just a vague idea based on having seen in places like Britain when I lived there how the Press, after being almost entirelly captured by a few wealthy individuals in Thatcher's years, very activelly and openly pushed the country first towards extreme Neoliberalism (which is how the leftwing Labour Party was hollowed out and replaced by the hard-right "New Labour" ideology) and later even Fascism (which is how the Tory party was captured and the "conservative" ideology it was replaced by rabid racist and ultra-nationalist populism and New Labour itself has more openly embraced autoritarian tools of exercising power, such as expanding extreme civil society surveillance more forcefully and deeming groups demonstrating against their policies "terrorists" and arresting those who support those groups).