3 ms·

Sadly, best thing these regulations could achieve is making Facebook work "worse", that is, not as invasive/addictive and thus not as harmful, and enable some c

Sadly, best thing these regulations could achieve is making Facebook work "worse", that is, not as invasive/addictive and thus not as harmful, and enable some competition. I can't expect that in a democratic society the very root of the problem with social media - that free speech worked well only in times when printing a pamphlet required some money, connections and education and set a high social and intellectual threshold for doing so, and simply does NOT make any benefit to the society when ANYONE can post on Facebook. Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote, becoming a snake that eats it's own tail. Sadly, this will eventually result in end of the Western world as we know it and there is nothing we can do.

tablespoon 5y ago
> Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote Um, what now? Are you saying universal suffrage is a bad thing? Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?
- OGforces 5y ago
  Yeah that gave me pause as well. Just says it like it’s a well known tenet of American political thought.
- cwp 5y ago
  Uh, children? Non-citizens?
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Uh, children? Non-citizens? The real answer was people who aren't "wealthy property owners."
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Often people cite people who are not interested and/or not following politics and cannot make an informed decision. That is the central debate around forced voting.
- anovikov 5y ago
  Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent. Just like "communism" (Soviet "socialism") stopped working when variety of goods in demand became so large, and life cycles of products became so short, that centralised planning no longer had any chance not to mismanage it - that is, simply due to technological change, or in communist terms, "progress of means of production", democracy seems to stop working when free speech becomes really, really free. I'd go on to say that, as a broad generalisation, rights and liberties of the Western world that we value so much are valuable and positively contribute to society only as long as they can in reality be only used by elites. Sadly, concept of human rights (late XVIII century) largely preceded industrialisation, and thus the prospect of exponential economic growth that will some day make "universal" rights REALLY "universal" - evaded imagination of their inventors. They saw those rights, as a matter of course, as "universal for people like themselves", just as they didn't think of them as pertaining to women - not because they were especially sexist, but because it just didn't cross their minds...
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >> Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"? > Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent. Did you answer the inverse of my question? It sounds like you think only wealthy property owners should have the right to vote (e.g. something like the pre-Jacksonian era franchise), is that correct?
    - anovikov 5y ago
      Yes, or something like that. People who can be expected to be responsible (they have a lot to lose) and who will never come to depend on the government, but rather, government will always depend on them. Expanding suffrage to people who depend on the government rather than other way around is easy to explain (populism: "let me create millions of new voters, they will be super happy and all vote for me"), but destructive and impossible to undo. And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech... Of course, there could be in theory a multitude of ways to fix it, not just by limiting suffrage (like poll tax for example), but all of them unrealistic.
carabiner 5y ago
Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated. Regulation of media can work. The thing is, TV wasn't algo driven. Facebook is a WMD for misinformation, it's just devastatingly effective, capable of toppling (or raising) governments and should have special rules.
- megaman821 5y ago
  There is a direct contradiction to this in recent history. The Iraq War started before Facebook was a thing. The false story about WMDs as pretense to the war was widely circulated by traditional media. 15,000 US soliders and 500,000 Iraqis were killed. The most comparable thing attributed to Facebook is the Myanmar coup where around 800 people were killed.
- bingohbangoh 5y ago
  We also spent trillions on endless wars, sacrificed our own to the tens of thousands, and others to the millions. These wars stopped with social media. They can't possibly happen if everybody has a voice and can call BS when they see it. If you start to regulate media this way, you will destroy this and we will tumble head-in to yet another war.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    We literally just ended our last war just over a month ago - I think it's a bit too early to celebrate how much of a peace loving society we have become. The war contractors were milking Afganistan for decades and haven't needed a new target - let's see if we can go for a year at peace before we declare pacifism achieved.
    - bingohbangoh 5y ago
      We haven't declared any wars in the past five years either. Administrations used to hiding bad failures can no longer do so. You can't have another Nayirah testimony if everybody is gonna point out what a lie it all is online.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bcrosby95 5y ago
Free speech on the internet worked fine before companies developed algorithms to feed you content that made them the most $$. I would also say there's a problem in traditional media - something shared with social media. Outrage sells. We have a bunch of people walking around being angry about shit that is never gonna change, politicians don't give two fucks about (except it gets you to vote for them), and all media are laughing to the bank because of the engagement it drives.
- munk-a 5y ago
  > Free speech on the internet worked fine before companies developed algorithms to feed you content that made them the most $$. Free speech on the internet worked fine back before everyone was on the internet - I don't think it's easy to tell if the shift was solely due to companies coming along with echo chamber algorithms or if it's an issue with most people not being able to handle being anonymous by default. I'm not trying to say it's definitely one way or the other (or some other way I can't recognize) - but I think we've got a very murky study with a lot of confounding variables.
- anovikov 5y ago
  It's not their fault that they have developed algorithms - after all, this is just survival of the fittest in the open market. Problem is exactly that with social media, masses, for the first time in history, actually got the free speech rights. Rights themselves are the problem. Founding Fathers who invented free speech could not foresee social media just as they couldn't foresee AR-15.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote Um, what now? Are you saying universal suffrage is a bad thing? Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?

OGforces 5y ago
Yeah that gave me pause as well. Just says it like it’s a well known tenet of American political thought.
cwp 5y ago
Uh, children? Non-citizens?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Uh, children? Non-citizens? The real answer was people who aren't "wealthy property owners."
ipaddr 5y ago
Often people cite people who are not interested and/or not following politics and cannot make an informed decision. That is the central debate around forced voting.
anovikov 5y ago
Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent. Just like "communism" (Soviet "socialism") stopped working when variety of goods in demand became so large, and life cycles of products became so short, that centralised planning no longer had any chance not to mismanage it - that is, simply due to technological change, or in communist terms, "progress of means of production", democracy seems to stop working when free speech becomes really, really free. I'd go on to say that, as a broad generalisation, rights and liberties of the Western world that we value so much are valuable and positively contribute to society only as long as they can in reality be only used by elites. Sadly, concept of human rights (late XVIII century) largely preceded industrialisation, and thus the prospect of exponential economic growth that will some day make "universal" rights REALLY "universal" - evaded imagination of their inventors. They saw those rights, as a matter of course, as "universal for people like themselves", just as they didn't think of them as pertaining to women - not because they were especially sexist, but because it just didn't cross their minds...
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"? > Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent. Did you answer the inverse of my question? It sounds like you think only wealthy property owners should have the right to vote (e.g. something like the pre-Jacksonian era franchise), is that correct?
  - anovikov 5y ago
    Yes, or something like that. People who can be expected to be responsible (they have a lot to lose) and who will never come to depend on the government, but rather, government will always depend on them. Expanding suffrage to people who depend on the government rather than other way around is easy to explain (populism: "let me create millions of new voters, they will be super happy and all vote for me"), but destructive and impossible to undo. And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech... Of course, there could be in theory a multitude of ways to fix it, not just by limiting suffrage (like poll tax for example), but all of them unrealistic.

carabiner 5y ago

Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated. Regulation of media can work. The thing is, TV wasn't algo driven. Facebook is a WMD for misinformation, it's just devastatingly effective, capable of toppling (or raising) governments and should have special rules.

megaman821 5y ago
There is a direct contradiction to this in recent history. The Iraq War started before Facebook was a thing. The false story about WMDs as pretense to the war was widely circulated by traditional media. 15,000 US soliders and 500,000 Iraqis were killed. The most comparable thing attributed to Facebook is the Myanmar coup where around 800 people were killed.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
We also spent trillions on endless wars, sacrificed our own to the tens of thousands, and others to the millions. These wars stopped with social media. They can't possibly happen if everybody has a voice and can call BS when they see it. If you start to regulate media this way, you will destroy this and we will tumble head-in to yet another war.
- munk-a 5y ago
  We literally just ended our last war just over a month ago - I think it's a bit too early to celebrate how much of a peace loving society we have become. The war contractors were milking Afganistan for decades and haven't needed a new target - let's see if we can go for a year at peace before we declare pacifism achieved.
  - bingohbangoh 5y ago
    We haven't declared any wars in the past five years either. Administrations used to hiding bad failures can no longer do so. You can't have another Nayirah testimony if everybody is gonna point out what a lie it all is online.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bcrosby95 5y ago

Free speech on the internet worked fine before companies developed algorithms to feed you content that made them the most $$. I would also say there's a problem in traditional media - something shared with social media. Outrage sells. We have a bunch of people walking around being angry about shit that is never gonna change, politicians don't give two fucks about (except it gets you to vote for them), and all media are laughing to the bank because of the engagement it drives.

munk-a 5y ago
> Free speech on the internet worked fine before companies developed algorithms to feed you content that made them the most $$. Free speech on the internet worked fine back before everyone was on the internet - I don't think it's easy to tell if the shift was solely due to companies coming along with echo chamber algorithms or if it's an issue with most people not being able to handle being anonymous by default. I'm not trying to say it's definitely one way or the other (or some other way I can't recognize) - but I think we've got a very murky study with a lot of confounding variables.
anovikov 5y ago
It's not their fault that they have developed algorithms - after all, this is just survival of the fittest in the open market. Problem is exactly that with social media, masses, for the first time in history, actually got the free speech rights. Rights themselves are the problem. Founding Fathers who invented free speech could not foresee social media just as they couldn't foresee AR-15.