Often repeated lies become truth

An excellent example of well-used propaganda is the sentence “Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was assassinated.“ Even though he was a representative of occupation forces, this is the name we call him and not an occupant. That was said at the third Café Brno, where PR specialist Karel Křivan and Marketing expert Vít Baloušek talked about use of social media in politics.

Social media enable us to easily and efficiently address many people. At the same time, it enables people to create an image of themselves which does not necessarily follows the reality. An example of that are profile pictures all of us have on facebook, where we use only the cute or cool ones and which are often “photoshoped.” The big reach and simplicity of use of social media is the reason for masmedia crisis. Everyone can be journalist even if lacking education or experience or both. It makes it easier for disinformation and fake news to spread. It can be dangerous as big share of Czech social media users trust news shared on them more than those produced by public media. That is why political parties hire agencies to help them with social media communication. These agencies make mistakes into assets and we experienced it during US election or on Czech political scene.

We also talked about the big data phenomenon – there is more internet content every day, speed of data processing increases as well as data variety, on the other hand it is harder to determine which parts of the internet content are trustworthy. This situation makes making decisions harder for us as we are overwhelmed by various information.

That was the third Café Brno which was organized by Youth of People´s Party, Institute for Christian Democratic Politics and Hanns Seidel Stiftung.