> Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.
In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best.
The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.
I think you underestimate, in the time before the everyday internet, how many people's world views and values were largely set by their direct personal experience, rather than any media they consumed.
Sure, church and state, and to a lesser extent newspapers all were involved in shaping culture - however the values grounded in personal experience drove many societal improvements in the 20th century.
I don't see that so much now, and the power of persuasion has widened from those big institutions to anybody with money - domestic or foreign and at the same time society is atomising.
In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of information and the rest relied on hearsay, at best.
The fact that you believe in this "it's different now" (under a thread about speech control on the internet) is a partial proof of how effective the propaganda had been up till now.