3 ms·

That'd be great but you can't teach everyone to be awesome critical thinkers. There is a question of aptitude. That focus also overlooks the fact that much of

That'd be great but you can't teach everyone to be awesome critical thinkers. There is a question of aptitude. That focus also overlooks the fact that much of the propaganda is emotionally-driven and appeals to certain instincts. For even the most rational of human beings, emotion can overwhelm critical thinking. So, while we can definitely do better in teaching critical thinking skills, we're just going to have a percentage of the population that is susceptible. And, given the fact that we're split almost down the middle politically (the election came down to 85,000 votes across three states), the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country. A more effective root cause mitigation might be to break the two-party monopoly so that a broader set of ideas can flourish. This binary for-or-against system is also unhelpful to say the least.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> There is a question of aptitude... the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country. At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself? Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already. First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters. And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines. But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.
- Erlangolem 9y ago
  Undermining any kind of trust in democratic institutions seems like a possible goal of these manipulations, especially if Russia is involved. It shores up the argument for “managed democracy” as Putin calls it, and gives autocrats something to point and laugh at when challenged on their autocracy. If rational people start to think in terms of historically failed and discredited notions of government, that’s a boon to any adversary of democratic nations.
- a_tractor 9y ago
  >expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy. And if that is true, then democracy is a fraud, or at least a failure. Anyway, representative democracy does address this problem to a pretty large extent. We can't expect, nor would we want, everybody in the voting population to hold the expert knowledge of law and government that we require of our elected representatives. Even if it were possible, it would be a monumentally inefficient waste of time. A small and limited government with distributed powers ultimately reduces the risk of such failures, but we are well past that now.

Bartweiss 9y ago

> There is a question of aptitude... the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country. At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself? Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already. First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters. And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines. But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.

Erlangolem 9y ago
Undermining any kind of trust in democratic institutions seems like a possible goal of these manipulations, especially if Russia is involved. It shores up the argument for “managed democracy” as Putin calls it, and gives autocrats something to point and laugh at when challenged on their autocracy. If rational people start to think in terms of historically failed and discredited notions of government, that’s a boon to any adversary of democratic nations.
a_tractor 9y ago
>expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy. And if that is true, then democracy is a fraud, or at least a failure. Anyway, representative democracy does address this problem to a pretty large extent. We can't expect, nor would we want, everybody in the voting population to hold the expert knowledge of law and government that we require of our elected representatives. Even if it were possible, it would be a monumentally inefficient waste of time. A small and limited government with distributed powers ultimately reduces the risk of such failures, but we are well past that now.