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Originally Posted by Lightspeed
It sounds like it was the Nazis working the media, rather than the media spontaneously producing Nazis...
And then McDonalds got in on their game and here we are.
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You say this like "the media" were some independent entity. TV was still a new medium and there was uncertainty as to how it was going to work (and bear in mind Germany was at the forefront of rolling it out as a consumer technology). There's always a relationship between civil society (the audience), capital (the corporations) and the state (government) - they're always all intertwined to a certain extent. [See work by Johan Galtung and later expanded by Denis McQuail]
The corporations wanted to shift as many units as possible to make profit (because there wasn't a separation between the production of technical equipment and production of content), the Nazis wanted it to be a communal experience (like radio). This is why most Germans experienced television though television parlours (Fernsehstuben).
My point is that saying "the Nazis didn't need social media" is wrong, they literally wouldn't have been able to spread their ideas without new media. The properties of a medium, who controls it and makes decisions about how it works, who has access to it and who profits from it all matter. Is it going to be a panacea to all our current ills? Of course not, but saying it's not a problem and it doesn't need fixing is literally a head in the sand type response.