People who believe in media effects theory are so touching. Presumably they also believe watching porn produces sex offenders (it doesn’t) and playing video games produces school shooters (they don’t). https://twitter.com/tpopularfront/status/1302219981120245763

The thinking behind stopping people reading the paper for a day holds that humans and our social world are highly malleable, our identities susceptible to massive alterations as consequences of tiny, simple interventions. [2]

People who believe in this version of “false consciousness” view human behaviour as irrational and easily manipulated. This is the image of working-class people a great many educated people hold at the moment. It’s at the root of the various Russia conspiracies about Brexit. [3]

Yesterday, the issue was newspapers. Oftentimes, it's advertising. If the claim that advertising has a causal effect on subsequent purchasing behaviour were true, I would be rich (I used to be a copywriter). [4]

The truth is that we don't know what works - we guess. We only find out which campaigns do well after the fact. And repeating a successful one is difficult. [5]

"False consciousness" and its bastard children are no more and no less than a claim that people don't know their own minds. This may be true for individuals (Ted Bundy was genuinely inspired by kinky porn), but it is not true in the aggregate. [6]

The replications crisis has its roots in studies designed to show small interventions have large effects. Academics wanted "WOW" results and now entire scholarly disciplines have been shown to be a house of cards. [7]

Next time someone tries to claim their study/protest/product/advert is capable of "causing [x]", I suggest exercising extreme caution, because the claim is almost certainly not true. [8]