20 ms·

Yes, social media is undermining democracy

• eurasiantiger 4y ago
  There is no ”social media” when it comes to politics. The field is full of players with advanced manipulation capabilities, such as orchestrating fleets of fake personalities. This sort of thing is rampant, whether we want to accept it or not.
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Democracy is a blunt tool. We should focus on decentralising power so as to minimise the situations in which a delegation of power and a democratic choice is needed.
• ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like? There are at least a couple flaws in this viewpoint: that social media is mostly controlled by a privileged few, and with enough resources an individual can gain more votes (if you consider an account as a vote). But social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation, and the result is kind of gross sometimes. In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.
  • scythe 4y ago
    >with enough resources an individual can gain more votes It's not just the usual resources, it's time. If you have lots of free time, you can make a name for yourself on social media. If you have to work and raise children, you can't engage as much. Guess who dominates the discussions?
  • fein 4y ago
    > Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like? Only if unfettered direct democracy includes censorship of any comment that exists outside the official approved message. I would call social media an unfettered plutocracy.
  • ep103 4y ago
    No, because in actual social settings, human inherently promote views they find to be reputable, and minimize the impact of speech they believe to be dishonest and/or harmful. Social media largely does the opposite, as a byproduct of optimizing purely for engagement
  • parasense 4y ago
    News papers and anybody with a printing press used to hold that same power. So it seems like the same thing, just faster, and whatever else... but that might be a too simplistic perception, ignoring other factors... or perhaps not.
    • pca006132 4y ago
      Or perhaps this shows that most of us aren't capable of or willing to think independently, and just trust whatever information presented to us? Previously, the authority are more careful in presenting information. Now the social media just recommend whatever that can attract us to the platform, regardless of how ridiculous the information is.
  • Test0129 4y ago
    I don't believe social media gives us a glimpse of democracy, but rather anarchy. As for it being controlled by a privileged few I believe that part is true from my experience in the industry, and my experience with it in general. It's very, very easy to sock-puppet and there are maybe...3-4 companies who control ~80% of all "truth" that is out there. For example, the rise of so-called "fact-checkers" is largely due to the control needed on society. You can probably think of 10 examples where a fact checker would be useful, but who controls them? Who signs their paychecks? The same people who control the flow of information. If you want evidence of this one-sided control ask yourself what would happen if you were a normal joe nobody and google shut down your gmail account, or instagram, facebook, etc. You've completely lost your voice. This fact that some company can be the arbiter of "truth" and information flow implies tyranny, rather than democracy. If the world was set up on mastodon I would be inclined to agree with you. However, in it's current state it feels more like a method to control people and not a method for so called "democratic" exchange. Control of the media is very important to governments exactly for the purpose of reducing democracy [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
    • commandlinefan 4y ago
      > You've completely lost your voice Well... that's true, but it's also the way things always were until very recently.
    • freedomben 4y ago
      You start with: > I don't believe social media gives us a glimpse of democracy, but rather anarchy. But it seems like the conclusion you reach is that it's tyranny. Do you view anarchy and tyranny as the same thing? Or would you view them as opposites, or somewhere in between?
      • Clubber 4y ago
        I read it as social media is anarchy and to try to censor it will become tyranny.
  • bluetomcat 4y ago
    It's unregulated and unstructured conversation in isolated information silos. Different groups of people are on different information streams. A particular conversation should be visible for the whole nation and the participants in that conversation should be chosen in a representative manner.
  • nend 4y ago
    It seems to me that since the rise of social media, politicians are voting in a way that's less representative of their constituents, not more. By that measure social media is bringing us farther from direct democracy, not closer.
    • q-big 4y ago
      > It seems to me that since the rise of social media, politicians are voting in a way that's less representative of their constituents, not more. A consideration: Could it also be that the politicians are voting quite like before, it is just that social media made you much more aware of the fact that this voting behavior is not representative of the wishes of their voters?
    • EUROCARE 4y ago
      How do you know it's because of social media?
      • nend 4y ago
        I don't, but regardless the US doesn't seem very close to direct democracy to me. So I disagree with OP when they say we're getting a glimpse of what direct democracy looks like right now.
        • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
          To clarify, I don't mean to say the US is looking like a direct democracy. I mean to say that maybe we can think of social media as a microcosm that shows what direct democracy might look like. Topics going viral are sort of like issues coming up for a vote, and the result is that you see different consensuses emerge and different real world consequences (companies changing policies and making phony apologies for things, for example).
  • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Yeah, I think that's hard to say without taking into account the issue of social media algorithms. These algorithms purposefully amplify some of the most toxic content out there, so I think gaming the system to harm democracy would be considerably more difficult if social media feeds were just a chronological list of friends' posts. Even without the algorithm, though, I also believe that humans just aren't evolved to have some kinds of discussions asynchronously, remotely behind a screen. I've found myself needing to disconnect from social media because it leads me to having negative feelings about people that I know I like. E.g. after the overturning of Roe v. Wade there were some posts by family members who I know and love, even though I know we don't share the same politics. After seeing their posts the first thought that went through my mind was "WTF is wrong with these people??" But if we had been discussing it face-to-face, I'm sure we would both have been more respectful of the other person's viewpoint, or at least would have agreed to disagree and move on. Everyone has seen it (and probably done it) - said something extremely hostile in an online forum that we would never say face-to-face.
    • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
      To refine the analogy a little more then: regarding the algorithms, maybe it's more like direct democracy but with a really powerful propaganda department (that's run by a sort of evil AI) influencing lots of votes? I very much agree with everything else you said.
      • marcosdumay 4y ago
        Why stand with the direct democracy? It's not like people decide anything that matters.
    • twblalock 4y ago
      The content promoted by the algorithm results in higher user engagement because people like it. If they didn’t, the algorithm would have been changed to promote other kinds of content instead.
      • zozbot234 4y ago
  • twblalock 4y ago
    Social media is what happens if you give everyone a microphone. The mob mentality, fake news, conspiracy theories, and so forth were all big problems in the past. Until sometime in the 20th century, lots of newspapers published that kind of stuff too. It’s an unavoidable part of human nature. People who want regulation of social media need to realize that they really desire a return to elite control of public discourse and want the microphone taken away from many of the people it has been given to. Maybe that is the correct position — but people making that argument should realize and admit that is the case.
    • galdosdi 4y ago
      > Social media is what happens if you give everyone a microphone. Bullshit. Anyone can post, but how much their post actually gets shown to others is dependent on the algorithm. Everyone gets a microphone but the microphone manufacturer gets to decide how loud every microphone is. Next you'll tell me the Letters to the Editor page in newspapers is a democratic space everyone has a microphone for because anyone can write in. The real innovation here is being able to make people feel like they're in a "democratic" communication space when it's still a top down media space where what gets heard is controlled centrally. Usenet, forums, etc were more real democratic spaces since anyone could just post, and it was up to individual readers to decide who to ignore. That said in practice, most successful communities usually had to have moderation to avoid being overrun in spam-- but this is a much more honest, gentle, and transparent sort of control than an algorithm that operates subtly, with the readers not even really realizing what other choices were ignored.
      • twblalock 4y ago
        > Bullshit. Anyone can post, but how much their post actually gets shown to others is dependent on the algorithm. Everyone gets a microphone but the microphone manufacturer gets to decide how loud every microphone is. Yes, and people like it, and we know that because they continue to engage with the content. If they didn't like the results of the algorithm they would not engage. The algorithm does not shape people's preferences -- quite the opposite! It is an attempt to discover their preferences and cater to them in order to sell more advertisements. If the algorithm did not give people what they want, it wouldn't work, and social media companies would have to change it in order to chase the advertising dollars. If there were two equivalent social networks, and one of them had algorithmically curated content and one of them just presented a straightforward chronological feed of posts, the vast majority of people would flock to the one that had the algorithm. The social network that did not have an algorithm would need to invent one in order to stay in business.
  • cpr 4y ago
    Are you kidding? With the incredible censorship exercised by the social media giants, you think we have unfettered voices?
  • kjkjadksj 4y ago
    The idea that everyone has a voice is false on social media. The people whose posts tend to trend in culture are often not random people but established players offering an already entrenched perspective. I would have agreed with your view 25 years ago, when everyone was making blogs instead of instagram profiles. But today what you assume is organic discussion on social media is entirely artificial, designed to limit the shades of acceptable opinion amongst the public in a manner not much different than old media has done (deferring to authority, pundits, established known variables).
    • elliekelly 4y ago
      This is a really interesting point. We’ve bought into the “American Dream” of social media— as long as what you’re saying is “good” enough or “interesting” enough, you too, can go viral. But the reality is the success is not nearly as organic as it seems.
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    > Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like? If anything is giving us an example of how not to implement distributed/liquid democracy.
  • m0llusk 4y ago
    Social bubbles dominated by extremists has nothing to do with control by a privileged few.
  • philodelta 4y ago
    idk, I feel like the opacity of social media allows for the more direct control of the zeitgeist from special interests. Propaganda can be given the paradoxical credibility of a "concerned citizen" through mass bot campaigns or not even bots, media specialists being paid to disseminate scripted opinions with just as much verisimilitude as posts from either you or me. We are all highly influenceable, and we are weak to this because we all believe we aren't.
  • thomassmith65 4y ago
    This comment fails to account for the fact that communicating via software is different than communicating offline. If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him. Such an outcome may be illiberal (it deprives the drunkard of his voice), but since it fulfills the wishes of the majority, it is highly democratic. If a drunkard wanders onto social media and harasses everyone, what happens next depends on the design of the social media site. Social media, like most online media, causes people to behave and to think differently than they would offline. There's a low limit to what we can correctly extrapolate about humanity in general from the behavior of humans on arbitrarily-designed social media websites.
    • ravenstine 4y ago
      > If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him. Let me introduce you to Reddit. Although on Reddit, you may be digitally removed for merely saying something unpopular.
      • thomassmith65 4y ago
        A decade ago Reddit hosted all manner of offensive (and sometimes literally illegal) content. It's not human nature that changed; it's the design of Reddit that changed. If we make generalizations about society using social media sites, we have to take into account that the design of a site, and the idiosyncrasies of online communication, foster unique kinds of behavior.
        • woweoe 4y ago
          But Reddit is by far the best counterargument to all these articles. It not only has the effect of suppressing new viewpoints and arguments that might make the viewpoints a correct (or incorrect) one, but it also has the effect of fueling resentment/blame against the left-wing because people mainly interact with the left-wing of the internet on a daily basis and see the left wing suppressing their personal complaints, and Reddit may have had the unintended consequence of helping the right wing by making them a protest party. The moderation on the site has managed to turn the entire global redditsphere into a US left wing echochamber completely aloof from the localities being represented.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • infamouscow 4y ago
    This is just the death throes of the legacy media losing their influence. The Internet democratizes the spread of information and smartphones give easy access to all of it. Social media allows bloggers and podcasters to distribute information faster, cheaper, and to a much larger audience than the printing press, radio, or television could ever dream of.
  • jonathanstrange 4y ago
    If you mean "direct democracy" by "technically democratic" then you have a point. But direct democracy is totally flawed and rightly no country endorses it. (To make this clear, Switzerland is not a direct democracy, they merely have more plebiscites than other countries.) Real direct democracy would lead to horrible populism, short-sighted and uninformed decision making, and a tyranny of the majority. It would also likely be hijacked in no time by taking over mass media, and turned into a real dictatorship. Representative democracy with minority protections and strong power divisions is way superior and what people mean by "democracy" (at least upon a bit of reflection). I don't see how social media could possibly make representative democracy more democratic. Since the posters who actually know what they're talking about will always be in a small minority, it's hard to see how social media could make voters more informed, for instance. Most posts on social media contain no new information at all, all the information in them is aggregated from traditional media in a usually extremely biased and selective manner. The vast majority of posters employ no journalists, have no correspondents, and do not gather any news of their own. In my opinion, it's important to distinguish between different types of social media, though. Heavily moderated forum-based social media like Reddit and HN make it possible to have halfway civil discussions, although the amount of noise and misinformation can still be high. I personally consider them relatively neutral or only slightly negative for democracy. They are good for finding like-minded people interested in niche topics, which can be good or bad depending on the topic. Social media like Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, seem to have no positive effect at all. Their rules of conduct basically enforce and select for passive aggressive posts and intellectual insults. It's unbearable for everyone involved and merely makes everyone more aggressive until they have customized their feeds so much that they create echo chambers. Such social media systems polarize a lot, even more so than traditional media.
  • jesushax 4y ago
    >But social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation Me and Elon Musk both have "a voice" but one reaches much farther than the other. It's like saying capitalism is true democracy because everyone can vote with their wallet. Or as a farm animal once put it "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others"
    • lalaland1125 4y ago
      People like Elon have an expanded reach due to their huge number of followers, but the neat thing about social media is that there are a lot of normal people who can also get a bunch of followers. People like Hasan, Destiny, or Popehat have a pretty much unprecedented amount of reach for "normal people".
  • silicon2401 4y ago
    I personally disagree with direct democracy unless it's extremely localized, and otherwise agree with representative democracy, like we have with governors, senators, and the electoral college. As Zizek once said, even if we had direct democracy, we would still have a situation where only a privileged few have the luxury of time, education, and understanding to be deeply involved in the political process, just like we do now. Except at least with representative democracy we can choose who those people are (and make them need re-elections), whereas in a fully direct democracy, I'd just have no say whatsoever if I didn't have the time to stay up to date with global economics, politics, news, culture, voting, etc.
    • imbnwa 4y ago
      Not to mention humans defer to 'representatives' anyway: local charismatics; implicit hierarchies at work, at the gym, school, etc; can even be anonymous, i.e. whatever ideology they purpose which they haven't carefully reflectd on for inconsistencies and aporias, etc
  • georgeecollins 4y ago
    I would recommend "The Myth of the Rational Voter" which deals with this issue very systematically. Democracy is good for a lot of reasons, but that doesn't mean voters make the best choice for themselves every time. I think over time the system heals though. It has so far.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      Yeah when it comes to detailed policy decisions, voters have a huge information disparity. This is why a solid trust in media is so critical to democracy: otherwise the situation devolves into a contest of persuasive personality.
  • babypuncher 4y ago
    I don't believe so. I think the problem is the way social media platforms prioritize engagement above all else. They use clever algorithms to curate the content you scroll through to maximize time spent engaging with the platform. This has a side effect of promoting fringe content, because it drives engagement. Even if the interaction is the user calling someone an idiot for thinking the Earth is flat, that is still engagement. It gets fed into the algorithm, and now that content gets recommended to more and more people. Reddit is the only social media platform that I think actually resembles a direct democracy. It's algorithm is driven by the karma system, not engagement. Posts and comments that people mostly dislike or disagree with get hidden by their low karma scores even though they often have high engagement metrics for the few people who do see them. This direct democracy comes with it's own problems though, mainly in how it reinforces groupthink and the formation of echo chambers.
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  • dgudkov 4y ago
    Social media in its current form (ad-driven, VC-backed) is far from direct democracy. It's obscurely controlled by not elected persons working for large corporation, optimized by AI/ML algorithms for confrontation (a.k.a. "engagement") and ad revenue, not for social problem-solving. The current social media are simply designed for a different purpose.
  • loldk 4y ago
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > in other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic That pure popular democracy per se doesn’t work was well known when our republic was founded. That knowledge, drawn from antiquity and refreshed over millennia, has been edited out of our culture’s diet over the past century. (In part because in fascism and totalitarianism we saw its opposite noxiously close.) A perusing of the Federalist Papers [0] is quick refreshment, however, and it’s shockingly topical to this day. Unfettered democracy is a ship with untethered cargo. Once the crowd starts oscillating it self amplifies, careening into majoritarian tyranny (often punctuated by hyper partisan deadlock). This happens [1]. Every [2]. Single [3]. Time [4]. In small groups we intuitively know this, and thoughtlessly deploy troves of customs and manners reinforced from childhood and in part hard coded (e.g. our sense of fairness [5]). We make allowances for those whose interests are repeatedly, but reasonably, in the minority. And we tell jerks to shut the hell up, and if they don’t, stop inviting them. In large groups, none of that comes naturally. It needs to be codified. Particularly when customs and norms vary across people, regions and time. Yet we somehow are led to believe that no, if we just did this or that with elections, the law of large numbers ensures rationality, and the madness that would ensue at a dinner party unconstrained by manners, norms, laws or empathy is somehow chased off by the garlic of popular consent. (In case it isn’t clear, I don’t believe in legitimate government without democratic elections. I love democracy. But more popular control isn’t boundlessly good. You don’t rest your case after showing X is more democratic than Y. If you love democracy, you should want it to thrive; for it to thrive, we must tend to it.) [0] https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text [1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-plague-a-cautionary-tale-of-democracys-fragility https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Titia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Titia [3] https://www.juridicainternational.eu/index.php?id=15331 https://www.juridicainternational.eu/index.php?id=15331 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street [5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baby-justice/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baby-justice/
    • elliekelly 4y ago
      It’s even worse than a direct democracy because we know there is a portion the social media “crowd” who aren’t actually constituents. So it’s like a direct democracy where the democracy’s enemies are also allowed a vote.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    No. People are not themselves online.
  • afpx 4y ago
    "social media is mostly controlled [and manipulated] by a privileged few" *additions mine but, you could argue that it's always been that way. The scale has multiplied.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    No. People are not themselves online and I assume that more people use social media than vote.
  • stronglikedan 4y ago
    > social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation This is demonstrably false, as illustrated by the spate of silencing dissenting voices on various platforms, regardless of whether their content is factual. Just today even, you can no longer talk about how the Biden admin has redefined the word "recession", without Facebook removing your post. They claim it's not factual, when it clearly is. But is it dissenting from what the "privileged few" want the masses to believe, so it is silenced. There's literally a new example of this each and every day.
  • atoav 4y ago
    Social media is dangerous, because the algorithms that make it money are milking negative emotions like outrage and hate. Social media as "people interacring on the internet" is not bad per se. For example I'd guess Hacker News' net benefit for democracy would be positive.
  • marsven_422 4y ago
  • 8note 4y ago
    In a democracy, you only get the one vote, but in social media, you can have thousands or millions
    • paulryanrogers 4y ago
      With lobbying and money as protected speech can have thousands or millions worth of influence without social media.
  • michaelbrave 4y ago
    It would be that way if not for the bad actors, manipulators, misinformation, advertising and algos that place engagement over all else. Too much going on behind the scenes for it to actually be democracy.
  • hulitu 4y ago
    > Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like? If Cambridge Analytica is "a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like" , then yes. Social media is a mass controll platform.
  • 4oo4 4y ago
    Interesting take, in a way it resembles direct democracy, but I don't think it qualifies since votes are meaningless in terms of what substantive power you gain from votes. Just because you have the right to speak your mind and have other people hear you does not mean you have any power over the direction of the platform or any additional agency. You can say (almost) whatever you want on the platform, but Facebook is still the arbiter of what speech is allowed on the platform and can ban you at any time, and as a user you are still nothing more than raw materials to them while they seek to monopolize your attention and energy. The same goes outside of Facebook too for Americans, we can speak our minds but our political rights are being taken away because they inconvenience wealthy and powerful people. Without other freedoms, like freedom over your body, freedom from corporations abusing you by breaking the law and suffering no consequences, the right to vote, the Fourth Amendment, etc, freedom of speech is pretty empty on its own. Direct democracy can have problems like you're describing, but I don't think it's the issue here. Rather it's exposing the fundamental issues of late capitalism that fails to meet human needs (healthcare, housing, belonging/emotional needs), compounded with unchecked corporate power which is increasingly resembling fascism. In fact, at this point most of the major tech companies (Google, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) are hiring many people from intelligence services. Corporate power merging with government power, especially by corporations hiring government spies, is a huge red flag for fascism taking hold. Before questioning democracy (which is a trend I've seen lately, as if to normalize democratic backsliding), I think we should start questioning that first. - https://mronline.org/2021/06/14/jessica-ashooh-the-taming-of-reddit-and-the-national-security-state-plant-tabbed-to-do-it/ https://mronline.org/2021/06/14/jessica-ashooh-the-taming-of... - https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-spooks-secret-agents/281114/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number... - https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engine-google-ranks-cia-agents/281490/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin... - https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tikto...
• le-mark 4y ago
  The rise of social media was somewhat preceded by the retirement of the fairness doctrine, and coincided with the rise in partisan media (1). Would a reintroduction of the fairness doctrine via legislation help in any way? I tend to think it would. 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
  • Kye 4y ago
    What exactly would it do? Broadcast is an increasingly uniform, bland, and irrelevant set of stock footage and scripts targeting a shrinking population. The fairness doctrine wouldn't have had any more impact on social media than it did cable.
• Grim-444 4y ago
  It's pretty ironic that an article that decries the rise of polarization, using the term "polarization" 18 separate times, ends up being basically just a checklist of one-sided ideological complaints about the other side.
  • bena 4y ago
    Why would it be ironic to use a word describing the thing you're talking about a lot? It seems that if you're talking about polarization, the word is going to come up more than once.
    • cato_the_elder 4y ago
      > Why would it be ironic to use a word describing the thing you're talking about a lot? Their position seems to be that polarization (in the sense of the sides being pushed to extremes) is a bad thing, they claim that has happened, and yet they are extremely one-sided.
  • desindol 4y ago
    Seems pretty fitting tbh? polarization noun [1] : division into two sharply distinct opposites especially : a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes political polarization … the relationship between partisan polarization and legislative gridlock is direct, with stalemate more frequent as the political center shrinks. — Sarah A. Binder The drift in our society now is not toward a grouping around the middle, but toward polarization. — Richard Todd … the venue where our most fractious … arguments over identity occur: the internet. These arguments do not play out on a democratized playing field where all identities are weighted equally; rather, they play out in a meticulously crafted environment where identities are microtargeted and polarization is amplified by algorithms. — Emma Levy [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/polarization https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/polarization
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• throwaway743 4y ago
  Ugh... this topic is exhausting, blown out of proportion, red-baity, and the voices yelling about it from the hills are usually blind to all players but one in the game of propaganda/public influence. It's also been a big part of political scapegoating/distraction of recent years. It's a butchered topic, but with media revenue declining since the end of the 24/7 trump reality show, media is still reaching at this narrative since it still catches some eyes, still fresh in the public's mind, and still evokes outrage in their target audiences. Just so over hearing it, nevermind seeing that it has made its way to the front page of hn...
  • h2odragon 4y ago
    "the front page of HN" is not so sacred; the politics of Tom Bombadil have been done and there's those that are so over that, too. Allow others the room to learn the weary cynical wisdom you've gained. Be open to the possibility that there still banality you haven't witnessed; and the hope of originality.
    • throwaway743 4y ago
      Fair enough. Also, I appreciate the balanced optimism in your last lines.
      • klondike_klive 4y ago
        So shines a good deed in a weary world.
  • imiric 4y ago
    Exhausting, yes, but I don't see how it can be blown out of proportion. The existence of social media is definitely undermining democracies, just like all previous mass propaganda machines, except with a larger and more accessible reach than ever before. There's nothing for researchers to study to reach this conclusion. Have we all forgotten about Cambridge Analytica? As a reminder, they used targetted ads to spread disinformation on social media, the effects of which have surely influenced the status of dozens of "democracies" around the world. It's certainly not the only company in that business, just one that happened to be widely publicized. Social media is not a unique tool in the arsenal of rich megalomaniacs, but to claim it doesn't have a major role in undermining democracies is willfully ignorant.
• deleted 4y ago
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• cynusx 4y ago
  I always think a simple measure that would fix the toxicity in social media is to adopt the "right to answer" that worked for ages in the newspaper business. It works by obliging the newspaper to print a correction at the same location as where they published the original piece (that was proved wrong in a court-of-peers of some sort). It acts as an effective check because the right to answer would reach the same audience as the original fake piece and the credibility of the newspaper would decline. In social media, fake news spreads virally and there is very little recourse except tweeting a correction and hoping it goes equally viral. A simple law could require for-profit publishers of fake news to ensure a similar audience (retargeting or newly paid) reads the correction. That would destroy all the profit of publishing fake news, while reducing the credibility of the fake news publisher effectively.
  • cwkoss 4y ago
    What is 'fake news' cannot be objectively determined - would just be a new cudgel for elites to use on the weak for their own power.
    • krapp 4y ago
      It can far more often than not. However certain parties have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that all news is equally fake and that any attempt to distinguish truth from lies is simply propaganda.
      • cwkoss 4y ago
        It's epistemology 101. Absolute truth can never be determined. So we must inherently use imperfect method of approximating the truth. Those approximations are open to criticism, so any system that determines fake news will necessarily have to take a 'stance' in some situations: it will politicize and reflect the biases of those administrating the system.
    • someNameIG 4y ago
      I wouldn't say that's always the case. For example not long ago I saw some "news" segment going around twitter saying a paper showed that the COVID mRNA vaccines where gene therapy. The paper said no such thing, it wasn't even a slight misinterpretation but an outright lie.
• jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  Plato thought democracy held the seeds of its own destruction. Hard to argue with him. It's hard to pick a time when the US was more democratic than it is now though.
  • desindol 4y ago
    The US never was a true democracy. I hope we will see the day when it becomes one.
    • revscat 4y ago
      You will not, so long as the Senate exists, with the Supreme Court an additional firewall. This Constitution was written for slaveholders, giving them permanent power in the creation and structuring of the Senate. It was designed to serve the 0.1%, and does so admirably.
      • periphrasis 4y ago
        ? Madison et al. are quite explicit that non-proportional representation in the Senate was a deeply regrettable compromise that could potentially create extraordinary difficulties down the line. The only thing keeping it from being completely unjustifiable was that the alternative was remaining under the articles of confederation, which was already in the process of breaking down (hence the need for a constitutional convention in the first place). Far from being a concession to slave states, which were growing rapidly at the time and consequently favored proportional representation, the Connecticut Compromise was a concession to small states, mostly in the North (indeed the name of the compromise is a hint here). See Federalist 62 to see just how disappointed Madison et al. were to be forced to accept this compromise by political necessity. To be clear, slavery and its legacy has had a profoundly malign influence on American politics and its constitution, but non proportional representation in the Senate is not an example of it.
    • jeffreyrogers 4y ago
      It was never intended to be a true democracy and there have never been true democracies that scale up. The New England town meeting is the closest thing to real democracy in the modern world and they don't have any real power. Maybe technological changes will enable true democracy, but I doubt it. It's not really clear to me what a true democracy means since it's unlikely that best leader/best lawgivers correspond to most likely to be elected. In a small community electability is somewhat of a proxy for skill in governance but that's not true as the size of the electorate scales and the skill that elections select for becomes more weighted to marketability and salesmanship. Those are important skills for leaders to have but they are probably not the most important.
• hunglee2 4y ago
  Democracy has never been in better health - more citizens are politically activated than ever before. Remember not so long ago we (as in 'the media') were complaining about voter apathy and declining interest in politics? Now those very same voices are complaining that the people are too invested in the political process. Like it or not, political polarization is political engagement by the people. That increased engagement is in of itself is a cause for alarm says a lot about a system where apathetic citizenry is considered the preferred state
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    Not all political activism is democratic. For example, just a bit ago some very politically active people decided to violently attack the US Capitol in an attempt to obstruct the culmination of the democratic process. That's not an expression of democratic values.
    • hi5eyes 4y ago
      citizens wanting to overthrow a sitting gov isnt democratic ok
      • nmz 4y ago
        Maybe it is, If the majority wants to overturn their democracy, then that's also democratic. it wont be democratic after.
        • hunglee2 4y ago
          this is an interesting conundrum, similar to the paradox of tolerance. In the end, we will likely draw a line based on an arbitrary rule, like any authoritarian would
    • houston_Euler 4y ago
      Yeah, political engagement was likely near its peak during the Civil War. I don't think it's as positive an aspect of polarization as the OP suggested.
• rhacker 4y ago
  Hacker news is actually non-democratic because people that are down voted and flagged makes content disappear/drop. So the site encourages the small voices to "go away" in favor of the popular opinion. Or maybe that is what democracy is all about :shrug:
• joenot443 4y ago
  https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/social-media-harm-facebook-meta-response/670975 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...
• dmatech 4y ago
  This somewhat assumes that the purpose of democracy is to create stability and institutional trust at the possible expense of freedom. Social media creates terrible disorder compared to what you can get by ABC, CBS, and NBC giving you roughly the same nightly news and fostering agreement among the masses. At that time, getting into the mass media business was costly. There wasn't too much competition if you wanted that kind of reach. But now, reach is very different. Gone are the days when reach was restricted to the upper crust. Now, some YouTuber can gain a following that rivals one of these esteemed institutions. So I'll ask the big question. Does society need gatekeepers to control who has reach in order to remain stable? You can easily argue that it still does, but they're people who tweak algorithms or work at trust & safety departments. And if society needs these gatekeepers, what should their qualifications be?
  • mro_name 4y ago
    > This somewhat assumes that the purpose of democracy is to create stability and institutional trust at the possible expensive of freedom. the expense is a fact. You are describing the social contract, right?
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    > Does society need gatekeepers to control who has reach in order to remain stable? This is the unspoken part of these sorts of criticisms of social media--people aren't responsible enough to form their own opinions. I actually believe that's the case, but I also believe in free speech, and I'm not sure how to reconcile those things.
    • ausbah 4y ago
      I think part of remedy is promoting an informed electorate. I imagine this would start at the level of schooling with promoting critical thinking and instillation of democratic supporting virtues (like always vote)
      • odorousrex 4y ago
        I agree with you, but the problem with this approach is there a vocal minority (in the US at least) that vehemently opposes this as it hurts votes for "their side". The last thing they want is an educated, critical thinking, populace. They want people who will fall in line, and do as they are let to believe.
• 99_00 4y ago
  "Harmful to democracy" = "Harmful to people who are currently in control"
  • guywithahat 4y ago
    Yeah there's some irony in this article since the Atlantic has a reputation for making up quotes to publish
  • krapp 4y ago
    No, it really isn't. The people currently in control seem to be doing just fine.
• sim7c00 4y ago
  social media or any similar technologies arent an issue. how they are consumed and misunderstood is an issue. an issue caused by lack of education and outdated educational systems at its core..
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Is social media and technology in general undermining the traditional democracy? Yes. And that's a positive. Well, as long as you're not an entity that benefits - financially or otherwise - from the status quo. Then of course you're going to want retain your power and its benefits. The vast majority of those questioning the changes are those who will lose as we become more self-governed. The Atlantic included.
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Stupid metaphors from microplastics to tobacco, unrelated grievances from Trump to teen mental health, no attempt to understand what social media is and how letting people talk to each other is undermining democracy.
• mro_name 4y ago
  what is social media after all but picking a billionaire and his stuffy ruleset. If we would empower the people to write on the web on their own behalf I'd say 'no', because that's the idea of the forum or the agora I guess.
• boredemployee 4y ago
  We should delete the internet for a while
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• choward 4y ago
  This article itself is undermining democracy. It reads like an ad for now censorship. The Atlantic is owned mostly by "philanthropist" Laurene Powell Jobs since 2017. Why is it that philanthropists are always buying up media companies? It couldn't possibly be to promote their own ideologies. They always happen to push for censorship also. Billionaires buying up all media companies and censoring debate is a far bigger threat to democracy than some people chatting online.
  • onetimeusename 4y ago
    Somewhat parallel to your point is how traditional media seems to have blended and adapted their business model to work pretty well with social media. I remember years ago people talked about how the internet and social media would displace traditional media (I consider The Atlantic to be a traditional media source). But, in reality, traditional media has a big presence on websites like Twitter or YouTube and journalists at traditional media companies have large followings on social media. I think they are a major stakeholder of social media at this point.
  • b3nji 4y ago
  • BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
    Also, the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg was hired after his pivotal role in drumming up support for the invasion of Iraq, by falsely associating Saddam Hussein with al-Qaeda. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/cnns-new-reporter-natasha-bertrand https://greenwald.substack.com/p/cnns-new-reporter-natasha-b...
  • spasekocev 4y ago
    This reply has been deemed conspiracy theory by independent fact-checkers!
  • black_puppydog 4y ago
    Another explanation is that these traditional media outlets were/are having a hard time economically, making it a) easier/cheaper to buy them, and b) more attractive for someone considering themselves a philantropist, given that they are by many considered to provide a vital service to society. You're free to disagree, especially with that last bit of course. But assuming this view, "philantropists" buying news outlets is at least internally consistent without assuming malice. Of course, whether or not someone like Bezos should be considered philantropic in his motivations is another matter entirely...
• trasz 4y ago
  In related news, I'm sorry but I failed to verify a source again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News (Edited in a lame attempt to cover my stupidity.)
  • LeonTheremin 4y ago
    In the long run, Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft will reveal that they have real time surveillance of everyone's inner speech and hardware backdoors in all devices, leaving people in a "use our products or go back to the stone age" situation. Democracy has been long dead.
  • the_why_of_y 4y ago
    That doesn't look like a news source I would trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News
• ngcc_hk 4y ago
  I think it is the short term (a few days) that is most concerned. As said you can lied to a few person all the time, … but not all people all the time. Like open source and market there are bounded to be bad move and dead end, but the basic is still right.
• bhauer 4y ago
  Social media is a scapegoat, hiding a more important issue that doesn't receive enough attention: increasing polarization is the inevitable product of our two-party system. As someone who doesn't fit within either major party's ideology, I observe the increasing strife between the two majors with amusement and terror. Social media can indeed accelerate the polarization, but as the article concedes, polarization preexisted social media and I believe it would endure and continue to fester even if social media were undermined. Social media is a sideshow obscuring the root problem. In a modern instant-communication "infotainment" economy, a two-party system establishes a political game where ideological territory is nearly always split. What do I mean by that? Imagine all political ideology as a two-dimensional plane, or a map. In a two-party system, a position on Issue X taken by Party A will inevitably see the space of opposition on Issue X occupied by Party B, even if that position isn't precisely consistent with the rest of Party B's platform. By occupying the opposite position's territory, Party B can capture any single-issue voters who hold that position on Issue X. Meanwhile, thanks to the stickiness of a two-party system and the totality of their other positions, they won't lose members who disagree on X. The result is increasingly reduced ideological overlap between the major parties, whittling away opportunities for sympathy and reconciliation. On virtually all issues, the parties are at odds with one another, even if that doesn't seem consistent with their ideological roots or founding principles. Third parties are where you find overlap, like overlapping layers on the ideological map. But because of our voting system (called "plurality voting"), where citizens may select one and only one candidate for each election, third-party candidates are squeezed out by strategic voting that avoids "splitting the vote." (If you support a third-party candidate, you are strongly incentivized to vote for the major candidate you can tolerate, because otherwise you risk "throwing your vote away" and ultimately supporting your opposition.) It's for this reason that I believe voting system reform is the principal cause to support today. It is foundational: until we can reduce polarization, we won't have the capacity to address other issues. If we adopted approval voting (select all the candidates you approve of) or score voting (score each candidate from 0 to N), we would invigorate third parties by eliminating the risk of vote splitting. Following adoption, I anticipate we'd see a gradual migration of citizens to more diversified ideologies; a recognition and empowerment of their innate, personal, nuanced ideology; and a weakening of the one-size-fits-all ideologies currently peddled by the two majors, Republican and Democrat. There would no longer be an incentive for parties to always capture opposing views on all issues because other ideological maps could better fit the populace's actual preferences and therefore get more votes.
• draw_down 4y ago
• cwkoss 4y ago
  I feel like the Atlantic's vision for democracy diverges significantly from what the majority of Americans want it to be.
• hacker345 4y ago
• bitwize 4y ago
  "Democracy" is only democracy when the people vote for what the political-intelligentsia class supports. Otherwise it's dangerous populism.
• steve76 4y ago
• cies 4y ago
  Which democracy? The US is barely democratic. To be truly democratic in my book, the people need to rule. Voting on one of 2 evils every few years while having "your representatives" raped by lobbyists 24/7 is not people ruling: it's a facade for a system in which money rules. Pieces like this merely serve as a pretext for your fake-democracy to get more powers to sensor the, in this case, "social" media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
  • jdthedisciple 4y ago
    You sir, got it right!
• mdnahas 4y ago
  I did some thinking about this months ago and I think the origin of the problem is how groups make decisions. I think it is similar to a Flocking algorithm. In the algorithm, each bird starts in a random direction but then keeps adjusting its heading a little based on the average of its nearest neighbors. After many little adjustments, the birds will form flocks where all the birds fly in the same direction. Similarly, in group decisions, each person starts with their own ideas. As people interact in the group, each person learns and modifies their position a little bit. Eventually, the group's members are all thinking similar ideas. The big question is: Does this algorithm produce 1 flock or many flocks? If there is a force bringing all the birds together, they'll form a single flock. But if there isn't, the birds will separate into many flocks that each head in different directions and do not influence each other. Before social media, most of our group interactions were physical. If we disagreed with our neighbor at a school meeting, the school was still a force to bring us back together. If we disagreed with family, there was still family reunions or holidays to bring us back together. But social media allows us to "unfriend". That is, to cut connections to people who disagree with us. There is no forced interactions between strident voices of one political team and strident voices of another political team. The mantra of "for the good of the country" doesn't force us to communicate and bring everyone back together. On social media, we're fracturing into many flocks. A different social media paradigm/algorithm might include a force that brings us back together. E.g., not allowing "unfriend" or forcing people at random to interact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Algorithm
• bigtex 4y ago
  Was this before or after Obama was successful using social media to win his elections?
• jdthedisciple 4y ago
  I always find it hilarious when someone who promotes trust in centralized institutions such as state-funded mass media complains about social media echo chambers - as if the latter is anything but one massive echo chamber itself.