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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 viewp

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.
deleted 4y ago
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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...

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.

deleted 4y ago

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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...