In 1922, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann coined the term “manufacturing consent.” In Lippmann’s view, the best solutions to complex problems in a democracy could not be determined by the masses; rather, democracy should be managed by a “specialized class” and a “bureau of experts” that could best understand common interests and shape public opinion through the tools of propaganda. Edward Bernays, sometimes called “the father of public relations” expanded upon Lippmann’s thesis in his 1947 essay “The Engineering of Consent.” According to Bernays, the right to free speech and a free press is accompanied by a “right of persuasion,” which is facilitated by mass media.
“All these media provide open doors to the public mind,” Bernays wrote. “Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens.” For much of the 20th century, Lipmann’s specialized class could dominate media and communications in order to guide public opinion for commercial and political purposes. With the advent of social media, however, this dominance was upended and the “doors to the public mind” became more accessible to the average person.
On Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, the conclusions and assumptions of experts could be challenged both by their credentialed rivals and by uncredentialed laypeople. The election of Donald Trump, a figure who was broadly despised by the specialized class and whose social media presence was critical to his campaign, indicated that the soft, noncoercive style of engineering consent had been outpaced by technology. In response, the FBI and State Department transitioned toward hard censorship, with full support of the legacy media, using Russiagate as a pretext to influence and infiltrateFacebook and Twitter, thus transforming these supposed “private companies” into arms of the state.
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