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The harms of social media are understated. I live in Brazil. Social media was one of the main reasons of the election of our president, Bolsonaro. Now we have m
by neves 6y ago
The harms of social media are understated. I live in Brazil. Social media was one of the main reasons of the election of our president, Bolsonaro. Now we have more than 130.000 deaths from coronavirus, the Amazon and Pantanal are burning, our institutions are crumbling. My fellow software developers aren't just make some far way teenagers depressed. This is is real harm in the real world.
- Nasrudith 6y agoHave you considered that the root problem may be that a plurality of voting Brazilians are simply terrible people? Fascists rose before with radio and newspapers once and there wasn't any meaningful changes preventing the usage for such and yet they didn't reoccur indefinitely in the same nation. Stop blaming the tech and start blaming your countrymen for being awful people.
- fellellor 6y agoSorry, but this sounds mean.
- dang 6y agoNationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Nasrudith 6y agoIt has nothing to do with what nation they are - but an uncomfortable conclusion that the problem is in the voter base is self evident for elections. 1. Bolesaro is a fascist and only terrible people would support him. If supporters of genocidal fascists are terrible people the who is? 2. He won the election. 3. A plurality of votes is needed to win the election. QED the voting plurality are terrible people. I said nothing of other nations by baseline and thought it was abundantly clear that it was a lesson of experience that assuming that a large number of your voting countrymen aren't terrible people is sadly a mistake.
- fellellor 6y agoMost systems won’t change overnight because of the guy on top. What makes you so sure Brazil would have done better with the opposing party candidate as president? Maybe the problem lies in a supposedly chronically underfunded healthcare system, by a number of previous administrations? This would then reflect, in an electoral democracy, of the citizenry’s misplaced priorities.
- neves 6y agoMen, this guy fired 2 health ministers during a pandemic. And during a pandemic we don't have a health minister!
- tw1912112 6y agoI don't think there is any working evidence that Facebook has helped changing minds to elect a world leader. For all the blame Trump gets, Obama was the first leader to use FB for wider reach, and Twitter as well. Mike Bloomberg spent like some 100Mn+ on FB ADs but still couldn't convince even a 1% of voters in the primary. Blaming FB has become like very strawman, and indirectly insiuates that voters are stupid and gullible, which is never ever the case. This technique was used by Labour in UK as well, but turns out people just didn't like Labour at all, and blaming FB just backfired.
- intended 6y agoMost systems get built over time to be better. Every crack pot on top harms the structure, until eventually One Guy does break the system. Now if people want this outcome, its great. If you don;t want this outcome, its not.