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The bigger problem that I have with the idea that misinformation kills democracy is that it seems to suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon or that

The bigger problem that I have with the idea that misinformation kills democracy is that it seems to suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon or that the average person has been well informed throughout the history of western democracy. Democracy thrived before the printing press. Democracy survived the invention of the printing press, which was mostly in the hands of magnates who could afford it. Democracy survived the invention of television and radio, which was (and still is) in the hands of a select few magnates. We build up terms like "journalistic integrity" and look at the past with rose colored glasses as if these mediums delivered pure objective truth. If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats. If you don't like to see the death of that plutocracy, or you're happy to see a new group of benevolent plutocrats come in to retake control the narrative, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you don't really like democracy.

tshaddox 5y ago
When and where did democracy thrive before the printing press?
- contravariant 5y ago
  Ancient Greece perhaps? Though not in medieval Europe, at least not that I'm aware off.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    Europe had them in the middle ages too: Italy's seafaring republics (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa et al) where (nominal) democracies, practically owned the Mediterranean sea and lasted a thousand years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_republics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_republics
    - danenania 5y ago
      The Norse also had many democratic customs.
      - bolangi 5y ago
        Evidenced in the Icelandic sagas, c.f. https://www.sagadb.org/ https://www.sagadb.org/
- liberalbias998 5y ago
  The Iroquois confederation, known to its members as the Haudenosaunee.
- daddylongstroke 5y ago
  The vast majority of Slavic tribes 0-1100AD were effective democracies...even the majority of Polish kings post-Christian-indoctrination (1000-1800AD) featured an elected monarchy.
shrimpx 5y ago
What I’m seeing is a disintegration of the narrative, with a relatively small group of disinformation plutocrats bombarding minds at scale with conflicting positions. A compassionate view of humanity would say that humans are basically accepting. This openness can then be abused by viral misinformation. We could take the view that humans should just be self protecting and if they got duped that’s on them. But IMO that’s a depressing view of the world, and tends toward something like mutually assured social destruction in the limit. We need to protect our shared narrative. Also personally I find the view that “democracy prevailed before, it’ll continue to prevail somehow” deeply unsatisfying. Democracy is not built into nature. It has to be proactively maintained and refreshed.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Democracy is struggling with misinformation because Governments are losing credibility with citizens, this is not my problem as a regular person. I'm sick of hearing that it's up to "people" to be fed the right information so they behave the way that works for the Government and large corporations. Why should I trust the WHO? Why should I trust the FDA? Why would I trust Johnson and Johnson? Why should I trust Pfizer? Why doesn't the Government fund an emergency trial on Ivermectin? Do you know that these pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued if there is a problem with my health related to the COVID-19 vaccines? Why would I trust a system like that? Why wouldn't I be skeptical and why wouldn't fringe theories appear? I don't want information to be hidden from me to influence my beliefs, I want all the information made possible to me so I can make up my own mind. As Edward Snowden says, the worse conspiracies are in plain sight. I'm starting to think he might be right.
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    You can be skeptical about the vaccine, and fringe theories are normal and some are legitimate. It’s fully normal to be skeptical because you don’t have all the facts. But look at what Tucker Carlson is doing, as one example. He asserts outright falsehoods cynically. Take the wind turbine debacle in Texas for example. He asserted lies that frozen turbines caused the blackouts with implications that wind tech/greener tech is evil. Governor Abbot came on and added his authority to the disinformation. People believed it and got outraged. I watch political Twitter a lot and I can literally see how a cynical lie begins, produces outrage, and goes viral. What’s your opinion on that phenomenon? It seems that has something to do with governments losing credibility.
acituan 5y ago
> suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon Misinformation in this shape and form is a new phenomenon. And it is not just the scale; - the number of agents that push their version of misinformation is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever, depending on the particular topic. So-called culture wars have so many different sides. - technology not only scales misinformation, but it also accelerates it. The objective function of "increased engagement" meshes very well. Hard to grok, full fidelity facts don't get shared or recommended as much as rage-baiting or bias-confirming material. - technology can on-the-fly piece together material to conform to whatever bullshit you want to hear, I want to hear or the other guy wants to hear. As it is optimized to increase engagement, it can efficiently generate personalized micro-narratives, which is ultimately a reflection of our personal biases. The problems is it gets harder and harder for these narratives to converge. More on that below. > If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats As mentioned, original thoughts don't have the same propagation speed or reach as junk-infotainment, and you're just as subject to the narrative-shaping powers of those "plutocrats" as ever. They just blend in better. But the larger issue is that you can't equivocate mere plurality with a functioning democracy. Ultimately there is a single reality, and even though we are in divergent positions due to having different entry points and framings, we should be - however little - converging in our narratives and understanding of that reality as time progresses. But the opposite seems to be happening, we are getting dumber at scale, stuff makes less sense, institutional mistrust is at all-time-high. I am not putting this all on tech, but it certainly pours fuel on the fire of meaning-making crisis. I wouldn't take it for granted that we could survive this without it creating a larger crisis first.
- concordDance 5y ago
  > institutional mistrust is at all-time-high I want to point out that the biggest reason for this is that those institutions are worthy of mistrust, people just weren't aware of the need to mistrust them. The news media for instance has been gradually getting worse due to having to compete with internet sources and it was plenty shit back in the 60s and before... Then there's things like the replication crisis damaging our trust in science-as-an-institution and the mask flip flopping damaging trust in science-as-communicated-by-prestigious-bodies. And of course there's always departments attempting o justify their existence even when it makes everyone's lives harder for little gain (yes, I work for a mega Corp, how did you guess?).
himinlomax 5y ago
> Democracy thrived before the printing press No it didn't. Do you have examples of democracies before the printing press besides Athens and arguably the late Roman Republic? Those happened nearly two millenniums before the press and didn't last that long. "Thriving"?
refurb 5y ago
Indeed. One wonders how much of this threat of misinformation is being pushed by the mainstream media who at one time was the authority on truth. Nothing is more dangerous than someone being striped of power they considered rightfully theirs.

tshaddox 5y ago

When and where did democracy thrive before the printing press?

contravariant 5y ago
Ancient Greece perhaps? Though not in medieval Europe, at least not that I'm aware off.
- riffraff 5y ago
  Europe had them in the middle ages too: Italy's seafaring republics (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa et al) where (nominal) democracies, practically owned the Mediterranean sea and lasted a thousand years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_republics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_republics
  - danenania 5y ago
    The Norse also had many democratic customs.
    - bolangi 5y ago
      Evidenced in the Icelandic sagas, c.f. https://www.sagadb.org/ https://www.sagadb.org/
liberalbias998 5y ago
The Iroquois confederation, known to its members as the Haudenosaunee.
daddylongstroke 5y ago
The vast majority of Slavic tribes 0-1100AD were effective democracies...even the majority of Polish kings post-Christian-indoctrination (1000-1800AD) featured an elected monarchy.

shrimpx 5y ago

What I’m seeing is a disintegration of the narrative, with a relatively small group of disinformation plutocrats bombarding minds at scale with conflicting positions. A compassionate view of humanity would say that humans are basically accepting. This openness can then be abused by viral misinformation. We could take the view that humans should just be self protecting and if they got duped that’s on them. But IMO that’s a depressing view of the world, and tends toward something like mutually assured social destruction in the limit. We need to protect our shared narrative. Also personally I find the view that “democracy prevailed before, it’ll continue to prevail somehow” deeply unsatisfying. Democracy is not built into nature. It has to be proactively maintained and refreshed.

bamboozled 5y ago
Democracy is struggling with misinformation because Governments are losing credibility with citizens, this is not my problem as a regular person. I'm sick of hearing that it's up to "people" to be fed the right information so they behave the way that works for the Government and large corporations. Why should I trust the WHO? Why should I trust the FDA? Why would I trust Johnson and Johnson? Why should I trust Pfizer? Why doesn't the Government fund an emergency trial on Ivermectin? Do you know that these pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued if there is a problem with my health related to the COVID-19 vaccines? Why would I trust a system like that? Why wouldn't I be skeptical and why wouldn't fringe theories appear? I don't want information to be hidden from me to influence my beliefs, I want all the information made possible to me so I can make up my own mind. As Edward Snowden says, the worse conspiracies are in plain sight. I'm starting to think he might be right.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  You can be skeptical about the vaccine, and fringe theories are normal and some are legitimate. It’s fully normal to be skeptical because you don’t have all the facts. But look at what Tucker Carlson is doing, as one example. He asserts outright falsehoods cynically. Take the wind turbine debacle in Texas for example. He asserted lies that frozen turbines caused the blackouts with implications that wind tech/greener tech is evil. Governor Abbot came on and added his authority to the disinformation. People believed it and got outraged. I watch political Twitter a lot and I can literally see how a cynical lie begins, produces outrage, and goes viral. What’s your opinion on that phenomenon? It seems that has something to do with governments losing credibility.

acituan 5y ago

> suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon Misinformation in this shape and form is a new phenomenon. And it is not just the scale; - the number of agents that push their version of misinformation is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever, depending on the particular topic. So-called culture wars have so many different sides. - technology not only scales misinformation, but it also accelerates it. The objective function of "increased engagement" meshes very well. Hard to grok, full fidelity facts don't get shared or recommended as much as rage-baiting or bias-confirming material. - technology can on-the-fly piece together material to conform to whatever bullshit you want to hear, I want to hear or the other guy wants to hear. As it is optimized to increase engagement, it can efficiently generate personalized micro-narratives, which is ultimately a reflection of our personal biases. The problems is it gets harder and harder for these narratives to converge. More on that below. > If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats As mentioned, original thoughts don't have the same propagation speed or reach as junk-infotainment, and you're just as subject to the narrative-shaping powers of those "plutocrats" as ever. They just blend in better. But the larger issue is that you can't equivocate mere plurality with a functioning democracy. Ultimately there is a single reality, and even though we are in divergent positions due to having different entry points and framings, we should be - however little - converging in our narratives and understanding of that reality as time progresses. But the opposite seems to be happening, we are getting dumber at scale, stuff makes less sense, institutional mistrust is at all-time-high. I am not putting this all on tech, but it certainly pours fuel on the fire of meaning-making crisis. I wouldn't take it for granted that we could survive this without it creating a larger crisis first.

concordDance 5y ago
> institutional mistrust is at all-time-high I want to point out that the biggest reason for this is that those institutions are worthy of mistrust, people just weren't aware of the need to mistrust them. The news media for instance has been gradually getting worse due to having to compete with internet sources and it was plenty shit back in the 60s and before... Then there's things like the replication crisis damaging our trust in science-as-an-institution and the mask flip flopping damaging trust in science-as-communicated-by-prestigious-bodies. And of course there's always departments attempting o justify their existence even when it makes everyone's lives harder for little gain (yes, I work for a mega Corp, how did you guess?).

himinlomax 5y ago

> Democracy thrived before the printing press No it didn't. Do you have examples of democracies before the printing press besides Athens and arguably the late Roman Republic? Those happened nearly two millenniums before the press and didn't last that long. "Thriving"?

refurb 5y ago

Indeed. One wonders how much of this threat of misinformation is being pushed by the mainstream media who at one time was the authority on truth. Nothing is more dangerous than someone being striped of power they considered rightfully theirs.