Europe

In the West yes, people can obtain information on the internet.. But will they?

With declining economy and increasing disinfo, we don't have the time to sift through all the nonsense and obtain the actual facts. We might as well be living in China.

Did you follow what happened when a lot of American TikTok users made a trip to Rednote, a Chinese lifestyle app, to escape the looming ban earlier this year? The Americans discovered that a lot of what they knew about China was propaganda. The Chinese, to their horror, discovered what they knew about America, that they assumed to be propaganda, was correct..

Wait, you're both saying people voted for Brexit out of their own free will but also that advertising doesn't persuade people? How do you explain Cambridge Analytica literally influencing millions of people to vote for Brexit? (a vote won by 2% margin btw) - like why would the right-wing establishment pay for ads if not to sway public opinion?

Do you really think neoliberals spent millions to inform people why Brexit is good for them actually because that was factual information people couldn't have found otherwise?

No. Advertising exists to inform people about products and services. I do not subscribe to the notion that advertising can convince an average voter to vote against their best interests or contra to facts.

Then I commend for your idealism and congratulate you further for never having had anything to do with the cancerous growth on humanity's back that is the advertising industry. Keep it that way, you're already making the world a slightly better place by staying away. But no, it unfortunately does not work as you describe it. Spending X on advertising will increase your product sales by Y. That's the simple equation that justifies the industry's existence - and it works. Helping consumers (or voters) to make informed decisions does not factor into it.

Not in a Western society in which one can easily obtain the facts on the internet. This might be true in a country like China where the internet is tightly controlled and facts aren’t easy to obtain.

You'd think that, yeah, it's absolutely natural! But then you could also consider that even though a rural forest warden in the Harz mountains may hold and be entitled to opinions on, for example, both bark beetle control and foreign policy, he'll only ever be able to make a truly informed decision on how one these issues should be handled in his best interest. For the other he'll substitute a lifetime of proficiency with whatever is available. And that may or may not be in his best interest.

That's how everybody does it. Spending your lifetime immersed in academic peace-and-conflict-studies for example might leave you to conclude that in a world of squabbling monkey tribes, transnational governing bodies with actual agency and legislative weight like the EU are, so far, humanity's greatest and most unlikely achievement and that maintaining, growing and strengthening them while further eroding national borders is a reliable (and possibly the only) way to ensure sustainable peace and prosperity for everybody. And after reaching that conclusion you'd think "Why is this not obvious to everybody? The facts are freely available." They are not. They are there, but in a complex world the cost to aquire them is high. Few will spend six months researching a tricky solution if they already got tricked by somebody else into believing that there's an easy solution. That's not on them though, that's on the trickster.

And now I'll probably dive into reading about bark beetles for a week because I've nerd-sniped myself. But that's another thing: I can just do that. I have a well-paying job and plenty of spare time. In other words, I have a high budget to spend on informed decisions. That's a bit of a tangent from the original topic but the gist is: If you wish to assume ideal voters then you quickly arrive at ultimate socio-economic and educational equality as a necessary prerequisite for a working democracy.