4 ms·

What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail? Regarding the budg

What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail? Regarding the budget question - could we still vote on important issues and leave the rest up to the bureaucracy? i.e. The people have spoken. Make it so... If there is a major budgetary issue with a given decision, we vote on where to get the money... Even if direct democracy wouldn't work officially - I think it would be interesting if there were a way to collect the general populations opinion on a matter at any given time and make it known. I'm surprised Facebook/Google hasn't done something like this yet. I bet you they would if some startup came along and tried to market an app like this.

amelius 7y ago
> What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail? You don't have to lie in order to make people vote in a certain direction. For example, you could give more coverage of one side of the argument than the other. E.g. in the case of the topic of terrorism you can choose to ignore it, or you can frame the issue in such a way that it seems that the viewer is at a high risk of being attacked, e.g. by showing old footage in every news bulletin. As another example, take euthanasia; you can explain the humanitarian side of it, or you can zoom in on the mistakes that have been made by doctors in other countries in this context, and make them look horrific. You can apply these kinds of tricks to almost any topic, I'm sure you get the point.
aeternum 7y ago
Online polls are notoriously inaccurate. If Facebook/Google tried this and it gained traction, it would likely trigger an onslaught of fake and stolen accounts.

4 ms·

What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail? Regarding the budg

by wayneftw 7y ago

amelius 7y ago
> What if we had a very serious law that says that if you get caught lying to people about the issues being voted on, you'd be thrown in jail? You don't have to lie in order to make people vote in a certain direction. For example, you could give more coverage of one side of the argument than the other. E.g. in the case of the topic of terrorism you can choose to ignore it, or you can frame the issue in such a way that it seems that the viewer is at a high risk of being attacked, e.g. by showing old footage in every news bulletin. As another example, take euthanasia; you can explain the humanitarian side of it, or you can zoom in on the mistakes that have been made by doctors in other countries in this context, and make them look horrific. You can apply these kinds of tricks to almost any topic, I'm sure you get the point.
aeternum 7y ago
Online polls are notoriously inaccurate. If Facebook/Google tried this and it gained traction, it would likely trigger an onslaught of fake and stolen accounts.