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In a dictatorship, cracking down on social media is a no brainer. But I think social media undermines democracies as well. Social media vastly amplifies loud

• hyko 6y ago
  But Turkey is not a democracy?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • brnt 6y ago
    https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2020 https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2020
    • hansjorg 6y ago
      Their opinions on Turkey might be fair, but beware that Freedom House is basically an arm of the US State Department.
      • ashtonkem 6y ago
        If you’re not going to contest their conclusions, what was the point of bringing that up?
        • SahAssar 6y ago
          Acknowledging bias is worthwhile even if the conclusion might be the same.
          • ashtonkem 6y ago
            It’s also a good way to cast doubt on something indirectly, without having to explicitly enumerate any factual disagreements.
            • hansjorg 6y ago
              This is a GO masquerading as an NGO. A caveat lector is appropriate whenever someone brings them up.
              • brnt 6y ago
                I was with you until your used to word 'masquerading'. Nothing about Freedom House is a masquerade. If you don't share sources, then don't please write such things. [edit] Can't reply below: Freedom House is NOT the State Department. They're a funder, but not the only one. So your description still in incorrect or requires sourcing.
                • hansjorg 6y ago
                  They're masquerading in the sense that a newspaper will write 'According to NGO Freedom House...' rather than 'According to the US State Department'. They're not masquerading in the sense that they try to hide where the money comes from, but to the majority that read their materials, this won't be apparent.
                • 6y ago
    • hyko 6y ago
      See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
  • m_a_g 6y ago
    Turkey has been a democracy for almost a century now. However, it all comes down to this, what happens when people of a democratic country elect a president that has totalitarian tendencies?
    • SecurityMinded 6y ago
      On the paper, Turkiye is a democracy. In reality, since 1950's it was not. It is a dictatorship or oligarchy at best, funded by the big money of the world, mostly from the US. Rigged elections, placing puppet governments (like Tayyip) is an ongoing theme. At the time of election, people are given the impression of who they are electing as it is in a democracy, while the result is already known by the powers that be. Other than few military takeovers of the country since 1960, this country have never had fair and clear elections. Hence, Tayyip's puppet government has ben brought to action by the same powers that be, to decimate the Turkish armed forces, so, no more of those nasty military take-over actions can be repeated. Turkiye has turned into a Banana republic for what it is worth.
      • ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        If Turkey is a puppet, who's holding the strings?
        • zentiggr 6y ago
          What does their export market and foreign currency reserves tell you? (I don't know myself, just suggesting the points of leverage.)
          • nurettin 6y ago
            FX reserves tell us whatever every country's FX tell us. That countries have forex, gold and bond reserves to protect the value of their currency. It can also work in the opposite direction. India and US keep large sums of gold. Greece kept large sums of US govt. bonds (until 2008 market crash at which point they found out this was a bad idea). Japan's Abe is famous for auctioning huge reserves of JPY in order to reduce the value of their currency and stock up on USD. Reduced currency value means their exports became temporarily cheaper and this way they got an artificial boost to their production industry. This is a complex subject and doesn't show that "country X is the puppet of country Y", it rather shows how they like to strategize for their own benefit.
  • netcan 6y ago
    > Turkey is not a democracy? It's a democracy in terms of the electoral process, mostly... at least historically. Flawed, but the people select their leaders by election. It's not really a democracy in terms of political culture and rights. Very weak free speech, right to organize, right to assemble, freedom of the press, etc. They jail a lot of journalists, on charges like "subliminal messages announcing the military coup."
  • briefcomment 6y ago
    Edited for clarification.
  • pnako 6y ago
    "Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off" -- Erdogan
• dantillberg 6y ago
  > This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted. I presume you're referring to the 2016 presidential election in the US, and if so that's patently false. FiveThirtyEight estimated a ~28% probability[0] that Trump would win, and other major media outlets had similar outlooks prior to the election. Many willfully interpreted "28% chance" as "with any luck it won't happen," but you can't say that the media didn't think it was possible. [0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ (edit: updated with link to actual prediction by FiveThirtyEight)
  • boreas 6y ago
    Also relevant to note that Trump wasn't supported by a majority, as OP seems to be implying. He won in the arbitrary schema of the electoral college.
  • rorykoehler 6y ago
    I predicted a Trump win. Actually I said that Trump would win against Hillary but lose to Bernie. I still believe that to be the case. Though I like many of Hillary's ideas (such as freedom of movement in the western hemisphere) Hillary had too much baggage to win. She doesn't have the charisma to shake the baggage. Added to that after the DNC debacle (also after my prediction) there was no transfer of support from Bernie to Hillary. This was the final nail in her campaign. The main surprise to me was how close it ended up being. In hindsight Trump is the inevitable result of decades of gas-lighting. It may also be the pivotal moment in US democratic history where the majority re-assumes responsibility for their government. An awakening of sorts.... if it doesn't get hijacked by subversive political operatives.
• umvi 6y ago
  > This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted. I'm surprised you chose this as the prime example. I think things surrounding George Floyd protests are more apt examples (tearing down arbitrary statues, cancel culture, CHOP/CHAZ, social media mobs, etc).
  • briefcomment 6y ago
    Yes, those are better examples.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    The statues are not arbitrary and many of them have been objected to for years. Similarly, US police have been routinely murdering people for years. What social media has done is allow the creation of a "headless" protest movement that can outrun attempts to take it down. In both cases, some people have leapt in and gone too far because they enjoy the chaos, but don't let that obscure the real issues. No, the problem of social media is reactionary movements arising against entirely fake problems, like "pizzagate".
    • umvi 6y ago
      > The statues are not arbitrary and many of them have been objected to for years. Christopher Columbus and Francis Scott Key aren't arbitrary? It's not like they were removed by a democratic process. The majority had no say. A loud minority decided they needed to come down for arbitrary reasons and did it without permission. Anyone challenging them would be browbeaten by the loud minority mobs on social media and cancelled (employers pressured to fire them, etc.). Loud minorities have effectively been making entire corporations cower and kowtow on social media during recent weeks.
      • augustt 6y ago
        Columbus has been a point of contention for a while now. Regardless, corporations are not saying BLM because some tiny segment of the country thinks that. A majority of America supports the movement, and that's being reflected by PR now. The last line of defense for conservatives is "well actually there's a silent majority that thinks otherwise" and "actually most people don't care, they're just virtue signaling". And this works well when the Fox+ apparatus are the ones creating boogeymen out of minor things like CHAZ.
• netcan 6y ago
  A lot of these issues, and similar ones, have been present all along. Pamphleteers basically started democracy. Media influence, gameability, loud minorities, media corruption, & infiltration by foreign provocateurs... Media is a "pillar" of democracy. I think social media destabilized that pillar.
• Jtsummers 6y ago
  I think the bigger problems is that people seem to have developed an inherent trust of information they find on the internet, same as with what they hear on the radio or TV before (well, and still). Perhaps the trust is when the information agrees with their already present biases and preconceptions, but the trust is there. It's dangerous, and hard to overcome. And encouraging a general distrust doesn't help either, because there is good information out there. And restrictions won't do any good. It's the Internet. Practically, you can't stop E2EE communication at this point. Social media can become decentralized (with Mastodon and similar systems) or even p2p (with Secure Scuttlebutt). All restrictions would do would be to curtail the speech of people who don't know about them, and increase the utilization of these other social networks. Net effect: No change to the nature of speech, just to the places they happen.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    > Perhaps the trust is when the information agrees with their already present biases and preconceptions, but the trust is there. I believe that's spot on, and it's essentially the same with newspapers and TV, at the very least today. 30 years ago, there was only one truth, and it was spread via mass media. Now, there are competing narratives, both in mass media and on the Internet, and everybody picks and chooses what fits into their understanding of the world. > Net effect: No change to the nature of speech, just to the places they happen. And the degree to which you can observe and influence what is said. If you force people to adopt secure communication en masse, you lose a lot of possibilities. I don't know how much this is a concern for governments, but I don't think that they will be able to win the crypto wars, so pushing people into secure comms by overreaching today means they will have a much harder time tomorrow. But maybe they won't be in charge tomorrow, so it's not really their problem.
• analyte123 6y ago
  Legacy media amplifies a loud minority too: owners, managers, and employees of media corporations. Most of the "controversy" around social media, stoked by legacy media, comes down to the old loud minority not liking that a different loud minority might get a say.
  • adrr 6y ago
    Do you think extreme fringe beliefs like QAnon would gain traction without social media? Legacy media boundaries are dictated by advertisers.
    • analyte123 6y ago
      Scientology is considered a fringe belief group by many and managed to get hundreds of thousands of adherents long before social media. Just as an example that everyone always brings up, advertisers didn't stop the New York Times and many other allegedly credible sources from falsely claiming Iraq had WMDs, the result of which has killed approximately infinity times the number of people that QAnon has. Just like social media users, legacy media outlets distort the truth and stir up rancor in the populace ("hands up, don't shoot", president is a secret Russian agent, Obamacare is a government death panel, climate change isn't real: pick your poison).
• willvarfar 6y ago
  Perhaps Social Media has “democratized” lobbying? Historically, only the vocal minorities with money could afford to influence politicians. Now minorities without much money can get politicians attention too?
  • briefcomment 6y ago
    I think it's more that social media secretly gave lobbyists another avenue. In addition to paying decision makers directly, then can pay for a small army of loud people. Before social media, that small army might make up a protest in the street or something. With social media, that small army can seem much larger than it actually is.
• salmonfamine 6y ago
  I think we're encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn't have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn't fit. And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. The fact that anyone on the so-called Left supports the rights of these corporations to wield that influence by appealing to laissez-faire principles -- ("they're private companies, they can do what the want!", "If you don't like Twitter's policies you can go start your own site!") -- is mind-boggling. I think we need social media to operate as a non-profit like Wikipedia, and I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won't work. A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.
  • briefcomment 6y ago
    Lots of worthwhile points here. > And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. This is probably the biggest threat to democracy, and to 90% of the population
  • Hoasi 6y ago
    > A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media. I agree and would add that the same argument stands for the traditional press as well.
    • salmonfamine 6y ago
      I think before the advent of mass-media it probably worked reasonably well. A subscription-based revenue model seems to work ok. I think a reliance on advertising is what has pushed things to the degenerated state we have now. And social media has practically dictated that reliance.
      • Hoasi 6y ago
• vmception 6y ago
  Department of Health and Human Services should put some social media sites inside a federal public health order, effectively banning them.
• ecocentrik 6y ago
  The loudest minorities have owned media outlets and been major political contributors. Dictators and plutocrats both have the same need to control the narrative and mute counter-narratives that challenge their authority. When most people complain about social media they use their previous relationship to media as a benchmark for normality but centrally controlled media never really existed and is no longer strictly possible. Cheap media is always going to be attractive to cranks. Years ago it was pamphlets, AM radio, tabloids and cable news, now it's social media and email campaigns (yes, they still exist). Our relationship to media keeps changing and people learn to deal with the political discourse, disinformation and outright crankery being amplified by these platforms the same way they learned not to pick up an issue of the National Enquirer and tune out the nuts on AM radio.
• snarf21 6y ago
  You're not wrong but it is a little more complicated. We have lots of "news" organizations that also amplify the same nonsense and have the ability to undermine majorities. FOX News and CNN seem endlessly able to paint all issues as facts with polar opposite conclusions. I think the thing that has happened with social media is that we've moved even more to a sound bite and headline world. This is no critical thought or consideration. The headline said X so it is true. The "news" is willing to do anything for eyeballs. All information has become click bait to sell ads.
• baybal2 6y ago
  > Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants. A millennia old truth: take care of the politics, or politics will take care of you
• bmmayer1 6y ago
  > social media undermines democracies as well It's a good thing that power in democracies is determined by secret ballot and not likes on social media then!
  • umvi 6y ago
    Power in democracy and power in society are two different things. If someone is wielding un-democratic power in society, that power is undermining democratic power.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• oarabbus_ 6y ago
  >Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants. This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted. Dewey Defeats Truman.
• Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  > Add to that the fact that social media is highly game-able and scalable, and you have small groups of people working against the majority of the country. I started in this industry in the '90s, I like to think of my cohort as the generation who "built the Internet" (or the commercial version of it). We've created a monster. Or at least the means to unleash it.
  • briefcomment 6y ago
    I think a useful abstraction is that the internet has enabled an extremely potent form of _anti-social_ human interaction. When you have to talk to people face-to-face, there are a whole lot of checks and balances, both conscious and subconscious, that come into play and that tend to keep interactions reasonable. We now see an explosion in selfish and cowardly interactions. Good faith conversations obviously abound, but they have been effectively buried under co-opted hysteria.
• raffraffraff 6y ago
  So how do we, um.. destroy them all?
• chr1 6y ago
  Instead of trying to silence the loud minority, a better solution would be to return a proportional voice to the silent majority. One way for that would be open voting where people vote not for political parties but directly for laws, and can trade votes between each other.
  • rorykoehler 6y ago
    Given what happened with Brexit I think this idea can only work with a highly educated populace living within a society underpinned by intellectually honest political discourse. We have neither at the moment.
    • chr1 6y ago
      With brexit people had only one opportunity to vote, so it was possible to mislead a large number of them, about unknown things happening in the future. With a system like this they could change their mind as the situation changes, so agitation would not have the same effect. As the saying goes "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time", so this would in fact be a safeguard against things like Brexit.
      • rorykoehler 6y ago
        Gaslighting is endemic in politics.
        • chr1 6y ago
          Could you explain what do you mean? If you think that majority of people are not smart enough to have a say in how they should be governed, you need to propose some mechanism, of reducing their voice, because the mechanism which we use now, is saying that they have full vote, and ignoring their vote. Or do you mean that the current system is gaslighting and direct democracy would be better?
• 8bitsrule 6y ago
  >Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Including loud minorities that own most of the newspapers, television networks, radio networks, publishing concerns, banks, movie distributors, etc. > ... obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants Ain't that the truth.
• kunfuu 6y ago
  I disagree with your factual statements as well as political theoretical statements. Regarding political theoretical statements: There are different paradigms of liberal democracy currently. Some of them can be regarded as appealing to the will of the majority for legitimacy, but essentially they don't assume that the majority are reasonable, but merely that we shall respect the will of the majority and base policies on their stance. Disregarding illiberal democracy paradigms, all liberal democracy paradigms recognize the value of minority voices and recognize that their rights shall be protected, the right to freely express included. Regarding the factual statements: The mainstream US media didn't take social media as an input of significance for understanding the majority stance of US population before 2016. Those journalists had their echo chambers and represented a vocal minority in their echo chambers. Social media, on the other hand, provides a meaningful alternative allowing some different opinion groups to express their opinions beyond the echo chambers of mainstream media. The liberal-leaning mainstream media now has a tendency to exaggerate the influence of some niche circles on social media (e.g. the so-called alt-right), though.
• SllX 6y ago
  It’s the new printing press. Gutenberg’s printing press also caused massive social upheaval and without it, it is unlikely we would have seen the accelerated pace of scientific progress, the Reformation spread as quickly as it did, the decline of Latin, just to name a few things. It’s often forgotten, but freedom of the press in the 1st Amendment refers to actual printing presses because you used to be able to be prosecuted for what came out of your printers. Some people liken Section 230 to being the First Amendment of the Internet, and they’re not far off. That doesn’t mean social media isn’t dangerous, but fire is dangerous. Print is still dangerous. Guns are dangerous. There’s a lot of dangerous things out there, so where do you want to draw the line? We’re not very good at dealing with social media as a society yet, but you don’t develop antibodies to this crap without first exposing yourself to it.
• myopenid2 6y ago
  It's amazing to see the bulk of HN users turn into self-aware wolves within a month.