OK, but how then?

Wasn't that what we the west did during the cold war?

Is it not just that media is more fragmented and we've underfunded the fact providing media since?

Maybe it's more that the media companies have been bought up by oligarchs that think the narrative that's being pushed is just fine and dandy?

Twitter community notes are popular and pretty effective at calling out misleading information that has gone viral (organically or inorganically). I think writing off facts and arguments is premature.

Is that sort of stuff actually effective against propaganda though?

I'd assume that by the time a disclaimer is written up, submitted, and accepted according to whatever the criteria is, the original un-disclaimered message has been received and digested by its target audience.

Plus, the propaganda also strongly paints fact checking as a mere ploy by other_team to try to cheat and win. So even if the community notes get to them, they will chalk it up to "liberals trying to hide the real truth."

There are a few things working in favor of community notes there

1. Viral tweets have a longer-than-average time window between the time they start to go viral and the time the median viewer sees them, so a community note can get there before the median viewer. 2. Users who interacted with a tweet before it got a community note will get a notification when the community note is added. 3. Community note writers can leave a note on a piece of media. If a tweet with a video gets a community note, and that note is about the video rather than about the tweet, that note will show on all other tweets that show that video.

Source: this excellent interview with the Community Notes team (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no...), in the section that starts with "Asterisk: Another thing I wanted to talk about is speed". Really that whole interview is great, highlights how deliberate and thoughtful the Community Notes team was regarding everything about the feature. Which is, I think, why community notes have succeeded where a lot of previous fact-checking attempts have failed.

That's why Musk is going to "fix" them:

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...