4 ms·

Is it really a healthy democracy if the flows of information are controlled from the top down? If I provide you with a tuned set of information in which everyth

by esyir 5y ago

Is it really a healthy democracy if the flows of information are controlled from the top down? If I provide you with a tuned set of information in which everything says what I cant, I can get you to believe whatever I want. This is just changing the source of said influence, not removing it.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
Has it ever been different?
chii 5y ago
> controlled from the top down? but the facebook/social media isn't "controlled from the top down" - it's people deliberately choosing to _only_ consume them (thus giving those media companies defacto control over people's tuned set of information sources). I'm saying that most people don't care enough to look for separate sources and do their own critical thinking.
- esyir 5y ago
  I'm not sure if we're talking past each other here. Going to clarify my opinion on this a bit. - Facebook is generally considered in colloquial terms, a "platform". - Expectations by the users are thus that Facebook (the entity) does not dictate opinion, but instead provides an avenue for hosting and discovery of individual opinion. - Thus, to the userbase, Facebook is not a Single source, but is instead a aggregation of multiple sources of "information" (or opinion; Scare quotes were intentional) - One-sided enforcement of opinions on topics breaks the above assumption, converting it from "platform", to "publisher". - This represents far more centralization of information control than the previous "platform" state. I think "centralization" captures my intention here more than the previous "top down" descriptor. One of the assumptions of a free democracy is that people, as individuals, are permitted to discover their own opinion from available information. It's imperfect, but it's pretty important. If we severely restrict the pool of available information to just the slice amenable to whoever is in power, that's in effect the same as forcing their opinion. After all, you can't form the opposing opinion on something if everything you can find supports it. Addendum: On the gotcha of "Facebook's right to free speech". I'm of the opinion that this must be taken in light of scale and the subsequent threats to the individual right to free speech. Here, I declare (unilaterally, agreement may vary) that the individual right to free speech should be held above that of the corporate right, especially when scale is considered. I very much consider the largest digital spaces the closest analogue to the modern public square (some would disagree here) due to their scale and ubiquity.

by esyir 5y ago

GhettoComputers 5y ago

Has it ever been different?

chii 5y ago

> controlled from the top down? but the facebook/social media isn't "controlled from the top down" - it's people deliberately choosing to _only_ consume them (thus giving those media companies defacto control over people's tuned set of information sources). I'm saying that most people don't care enough to look for separate sources and do their own critical thinking.

esyir 5y ago
I'm not sure if we're talking past each other here. Going to clarify my opinion on this a bit. - Facebook is generally considered in colloquial terms, a "platform". - Expectations by the users are thus that Facebook (the entity) does not dictate opinion, but instead provides an avenue for hosting and discovery of individual opinion. - Thus, to the userbase, Facebook is not a Single source, but is instead a aggregation of multiple sources of "information" (or opinion; Scare quotes were intentional) - One-sided enforcement of opinions on topics breaks the above assumption, converting it from "platform", to "publisher". - This represents far more centralization of information control than the previous "platform" state. I think "centralization" captures my intention here more than the previous "top down" descriptor. One of the assumptions of a free democracy is that people, as individuals, are permitted to discover their own opinion from available information. It's imperfect, but it's pretty important. If we severely restrict the pool of available information to just the slice amenable to whoever is in power, that's in effect the same as forcing their opinion. After all, you can't form the opposing opinion on something if everything you can find supports it. Addendum: On the gotcha of "Facebook's right to free speech". I'm of the opinion that this must be taken in light of scale and the subsequent threats to the individual right to free speech. Here, I declare (unilaterally, agreement may vary) that the individual right to free speech should be held above that of the corporate right, especially when scale is considered. I very much consider the largest digital spaces the closest analogue to the modern public square (some would disagree here) due to their scale and ubiquity.