So, I had never heard this phrase until maybe a year or so ago. Now it seems like (on this site particularly) someone parrots this exact sentence in any thread at all related to news and/or social media.
Where is this coming from? Especially since it is... Emphatically untrue. It's just another one of those turns of phrase that asks you to believe it purely because it's so pithy.
People have studied this. A lot. It's just not true.
Or that the figurative meaning is wrong - that "shining a light" on shady or immoral acts and behaviors is not "the best" for some sense of that word, and there are better options?
As far as I can see, people like the KKK and other White Supremacists have been and still are thoroughly discredited. The only countervailing force to that in 2019 is outrage driven media, produced by other extremist counterparts. If one's business is based on outrage, then you want an enemy to play off of, to generate a vicious circle of outrage and reaction and counter-reaction.
Do most people actually think of the "Ok" hand sign as a Nazi signal? Absent the media spamming this idea, I highly doubt this would ever have been considered anything more than a stupid joke by the mainstream. The reason it spreads, is precisely because it acts perfectly as viral outrage clickbait.
Also, the counterparts on the Far Left also seem to demonstrate the truth of this, through their use of smearing tactics and de-platforming. If anything, they seem to fear the disinfecting qualities of sunlight, the most!
'Sunlight' from the press doesn't necessarily do anything in a court of law, which is the actual thing that is supposed to disinfect society.
A bomb-shell story which drags a corporation or white collar criminal through the mud won't necessarily lead to successful prosecution.
And using sunlight to simply damage a reputation has been used as well. It depends if you believe it's sunlight or not, so we just go back to old-hat media problems.
And using sunlight to simply damage a reputation has been used as well. It depends if you believe it's sunlight or not, so we just go back to old-hat media problems.
So let there be a "Free Marketplace of Ideas." This is again, precisely why we need Free Speech! It's when our society lets someone be the arbiter of what's allowed to be said and heard, that we run into problems.
Well, we can't uninvent the technology of the day, so that's likely to end up like unregulated social media, but we know there are issues with disinformation easily reaching a large number of people (again, old-hat propaganda, just we don't have to throw pamphlets out of planes now).
This isn't an easy problem to solve and I certainly don't have the answers.
Wow, I had no idea that the "Ok" hand sign was supposedly co-opted as a white-power sign until you mentioned it here. I guess I'm still in the shadows, thankfully!
So, I had never heard this phrase until maybe a year or so ago. Now it seems like (on this site particularly) someone parrots this exact sentence in any thread at all related to news and/or social media.
Where is this coming from? Especially since it is... Emphatically untrue. It's just another one of those turns of phrase that asks you to believe it purely because it's so pithy.
People have studied this. A lot. It's just not true.