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Are you implying now that it's impossible to hold politicians accountable because you can't prove any direct harmful causality between their actions and the eff

Are you implying now that it's impossible to hold politicians accountable because you can't prove any direct harmful causality between their actions and the effects on individual citizens?

Nasrudith 7y ago
No - but Facebook is not politicians nor voters. It should be trivial to prove harm from a politicians policies. There should be direct and clear chains of causation and knowledge applying actual standards. The reason you can't hold politicians accountable is because their whole aparatus of government is deathlty afraid of setting any precedent which might hold them personally accountable for direct misdeeds. See the furious rationalizations known as Qualified Immunity and refusal to prosecute literal war criminals. See the furious reaction to whistleblowers above literal traitors who sell secrets to foreign governments. It is abundantly clear that they fear transparency and accountability above all else and replacing the clusterfuck with something not even worse is politically very difficult. Blaming Facebook for "influence" is questionably third to fourth order as well, especially when far more direct culprits go unpunished without reason. It is classic cycle of abuse displacement of blame from a more responsible to a more accessible and vulnerable target. Sure grandma may voted for a guy whose campaign platform was literally "Mein Campf" subsisted for the local language and country but maybe the uncomfortable truth is that she was always quietly a genocidal racist who felt that mass murder was preferrable to being on an equal footing to "lessers" but was fine before because they "knew their place". Utterly horrifying but easy to see why most would prefer to blame Facebook over their family members for being responsible for being horrible people. It reeks of "follow the money" ambulance chasing of suing the laundromat for not having bulletproof windows instead of the gangbangers who hit the victims during a drive by shooting. Only in this case it is "follow the politicial power to try to dragoon it to something they think will be in their favor".

Are you implying now that it's impossible to hold politicians accountable because you can't prove any direct harmful causality between their actions and the effects on individual citizens?

Nasrudith 7y ago

No - but Facebook is not politicians nor voters. It should be trivial to prove harm from a politicians policies. There should be direct and clear chains of causation and knowledge applying actual standards. The reason you can't hold politicians accountable is because their whole aparatus of government is deathlty afraid of setting any precedent which might hold them personally accountable for direct misdeeds. See the furious rationalizations known as Qualified Immunity and refusal to prosecute literal war criminals. See the furious reaction to whistleblowers above literal traitors who sell secrets to foreign governments. It is abundantly clear that they fear transparency and accountability above all else and replacing the clusterfuck with something not even worse is politically very difficult. Blaming Facebook for "influence" is questionably third to fourth order as well, especially when far more direct culprits go unpunished without reason. It is classic cycle of abuse displacement of blame from a more responsible to a more accessible and vulnerable target. Sure grandma may voted for a guy whose campaign platform was literally "Mein Campf" subsisted for the local language and country but maybe the uncomfortable truth is that she was always quietly a genocidal racist who felt that mass murder was preferrable to being on an equal footing to "lessers" but was fine before because they "knew their place". Utterly horrifying but easy to see why most would prefer to blame Facebook over their family members for being responsible for being horrible people. It reeks of "follow the money" ambulance chasing of suing the laundromat for not having bulletproof windows instead of the gangbangers who hit the victims during a drive by shooting. Only in this case it is "follow the politicial power to try to dragoon it to something they think will be in their favor".