I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that's really not true for at least Trump.

The Trump route was more:

• Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn't doesn't matter for this discussion --- that was the perception.

• Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.

• Fox News --- already somewhat opinion-based from the start --- starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.

There's some back and forth here. It's not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they're willing to show material based on what people will watch, and people watched it more if they ran bonkers stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html

::: spoiler Section

When Donald Trump lost the presidency last November, Fox News lost too. But unlike Trump, Fox was never in denial about its loss. The network’s executives and multi-million-dollar stars stared the ratings in the face every day and saw that their pro-Trump audience was reacting to the prospect of President Biden by switching channels or turning off the TV.

“We’re bleeding eyeballs,” a Fox producer remarked in December. “And we’re scared.”

To fix the problem, Fox ran even further to the right. And here’s the thing: It worked. It was toxic for the American political system, but it was profitable for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.

“Fox is a really different place than it was pre-election,” a commentator said to me, with regret, after Biden took office.

The post-election changes at Fox happened one day at a time, one show at a time, but when viewed in totality, they are unmistakable and stark. Practically every change was about having less news on the air and more opinions-about-the-news. It was like serving dessert without dinner, when the dessert consisted of screaming about how awful the dinner was, and warning that the meal might be a socialist plot, and hey, while we’re at it, why are chefs so corrupt?

And because Fox News is the primary trusted source of information for millions of Americans, including Republican elected officials and party activists, the changes affect everyone.

Trump’s loss was a pivot point.

‘We denied the pandemic and now we’re denying the election outcome.’

Fox’s ratings declined in the immediate aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, so the slump after the networks projected Biden as president-elect was no surprise. But the precipitousness was a shock. Fox’s afternoon and evening hours fell off by 20, 25, 30 percent, even though the news cycle was nothing short of epic. For people at Fox who were used to winning for years, this was disorienting, and for some downright terrifying.

“Our audience hates this,” one executive said to me in a moment of candor. “This” was Biden as president-elect and Kamala Harris as VP-elect. “They’re pissed,” said a second source. “Seething,” said another.

I granted anonymity to these sources because they weren’t allowed to speak with outside reporters on the record, and because I wanted them to freely offer blunt assessments of the situation.

Fox’s problem was that the audience suddenly had somewhere else to go. On the up-and- coming channel Newsmax, Biden wasn’t called president-elect right away. In other words, Trump wasn’t a loser yet. Newsmax’s 7 p.m. host Greg Kelly kept saying that he believed Trump could stay in office for four more years. “IT ISN’T OVER YET,” Newsmax’s banners proclaimed. While Fox only dabbled in election denialism at first, Newsmax went all-in.

:::

There wasn't really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.

What would you propose replace passwords to not be susceptible to those things?

I personally like how secure and non intrusive passwords are, especially when using a self hosted password manager synced with git.

In Germany it's definitely true. You can witness this process in real-time. I already know the "arguments" the brainwashed masses come up with and if there's some new hot take, I usually go to one of the fact checking sites and immediately find said hot take there. It's crazy how easy it is to manipulate the masses via social media. There has never been anything more efficient than this shit.

It is hard to do well which is why I worry. Google probably has the best overall account security, you could fo worse than modeling after them.

The short answer to your question is Passkeys. But you need a whole system of account recovery around them.

I mean, people do use the Web UI.

2FA support would be better

Lemmy does support 2fa

oh. Nevermind then. I think this should be enough. maybe OpenID Connect support would be nice

Oh, you can easily bypass passkeys with automation. Don't even need an image recognition model, just a QR-code scanner like zbarimg.

But i never tried googles passkey feature since it never seemed as secure as a 48 char computer generated password. So I'm not sure exactly how it works.

Go tead the FIDO threat model if you want to understand how it protects against specific attacks. It is pretty secure.

https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.0-id-20180227/fido-security-ref-v2.0-id-20180227.html

Finally I had to choose an app, as there is no official one

It's called Jerboa and it's one of the worse ones, but it does exist

Passkeys are much better. Unlike what FAANG companies want you to believe, they do not have to be tied to a device. Use a password manager that supports them (BitWarden) and pretty much never get hacked again because of a password. Website doesn’t need to store anything that an attacker can use. No downside.

That’s a pretty wild claim. It almost sounds like you don’t know what a passkey is. Explain.

I did always think that a shared (somehow) login would be great; but how do you federate that? Do you? What if the original server goes down? How does moderation work?

It gets really complicated really fast.

Oh I don't know what it is, sorry I thought I made that clear. But a quick search on the internet said it was basically 2fa with a qr code and since the issue was how it would protect Lemmy from. Bots I just thought it wouldn't be hard for a not to read a qr code.

I’m not in a rush to endorse client apps adding large, experience changing features. That will radically alter the way different users interact with the service, they might need two apps to get all the features they want, etc

Sounds like a good way to make things even MORE confusing for new users.

The best center-right news sources are behind a paywall. The crazy ones, those are free.

Any thoughts on

https://fedi.tips/

I haven’t really used it since I wanted to populate my Mastodon timeline. Now it’s happening a little bit more naturally, through boosts and hashtags.

Any recommended reading for pass keys to get me up to speed? I use Bitwarden and have been happy enough with just passwords via that for a long time now. Only time I've seen pass keys mentioned really was Google trying to push it on me but I don't use their password manager.

For the uninitiated it’s basically a 1:1 clone of Apollo for Reddit. Hell, even the app’s name is derivative!

That said it’s still one of the best Lemmy apps for iOS and is a testament to Christian Selig’s original vision.