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Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's no

Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's not what you're saying, is it a proposal that the government manages our news diet, or what do you view as the solution? It would seem possible to me that if power was distributed widely over competitors it might be even harder to defend against, as fake news drives clicks which drives market share, everything about combatting fake news has been extremely polarizing (see this thread) and might drive bad PR to companies that take it seriously, a more diverse landscape might lead to a much more complicated regulatory landscape across competing products, and just a basic bystander effect of each executive team being more able to shirk responsibility because other people are too.

Fellshard 7y ago
Yes, but it requires a populace that understands and acts on the risks from single sources of information. A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place. Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.
colpabar 7y ago
Decentralization would make it a little harder for the nation states to spread their messages, but you're right that it would probably make it much harder for us to stop them. I AM NOT and WILL NEVER BE proposing that the government manages our news diet. I guess I don't really have a solution to propose, and the point of my comment was more to suggest that we should try to change SOMETHING so that these companies don't have such great power, rather than let them continue and hope they don't (continue to) abuse that power. If I could propose anything, it'd be that we stop letting outrage and clicks drive our political machine, but we all know that will never happen.

Fellshard 7y ago

Yes, but it requires a populace that understands and acts on the risks from single sources of information. A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place. Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.

colpabar 7y ago

Decentralization would make it a little harder for the nation states to spread their messages, but you're right that it would probably make it much harder for us to stop them. I AM NOT and WILL NEVER BE proposing that the government manages our news diet. I guess I don't really have a solution to propose, and the point of my comment was more to suggest that we should try to change SOMETHING so that these companies don't have such great power, rather than let them continue and hope they don't (continue to) abuse that power. If I could propose anything, it'd be that we stop letting outrage and clicks drive our political machine, but we all know that will never happen.