> I hate to tell you, but attributing all feminist campaigning to some kind of misplaced compassion or lack of rationality is pretty misogynist.
That's exactly what I am talking about. Attributing all feminist campaigning to anything specific is impossible (and therefore an excessive statement to make a point). It's far beyond human knowability by any means anyways. And implying misogynist behavior to the statements that I wrote pretty much is the start of an irrational - but also not an empathic - discussion.
Maybe the whole problem is because our language in physical form relies on intonation, stressing and nuances that the text form cannot represent, I don't know, I'm no linguist.
Most of the shitstorms I've observed in my social bubbles could have been solved easily if there were some form of empathic notations to the text that was written. Even just being able to express the emotional state while writing it (mad/sad/angry/frustrated/calm/etc) could have helped a lot to resolve those issues.
I think emojis tried to fill this gap initially, but it seemingly failed at it due to the differences of our generations online and their associations with them. Let's say boomer, gen-y and gen-z discussing a topic for argument's sake.
Gen-Z kind of evolved on the web, and they've learned to communicate their feelings differently. Other generations basically think that they're spamming emojis all the time, but gen-z kind of realized that it's their way of communicating empathic needs and expressions, which would be otherwise missing.
All I'm trying to say is that there seems to be an empathic/emotional gap in our language which leads to a lot of misinterpretation on the web; which in physical form never exceeds into the same absurdities because people seem to be able to express their empathic needs much easier then. And that's me saying this as an autist with huge problems reading (in both senses of the word) people's implied intonations, which is kind of absurd to begin with.
The issue with the populist journalism that you mentioned is that there's not laws in place to force them to recorrect their statements in the same populistic way they made advertisements for the previous incorrect statements. Usually you find the corrections in font size 8 on the last page - if there is even any correction. They should be forced to publish it in the same way, on the same media channels, as the initial incorrect article about that topic - by default, as an implemented law. This alone would kill a lot of shares of how misinformation, which appeals to angry emotions, works.
But then political campaigns wouldn't work either, so sadly there's no incentive for legislatives to do this.