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This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker
by jaybrendansmith 4y ago
This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they are entitled to their own FACTS. This is truly the challenge of the present, and I feel we are going to shortly lose our Democracy to bad actors who are more than willing to use our own intellectual weaknesses against us.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- abigail95 4y agoDemocracy is majority rule. Democracy is nothing about facts or opinions. You are the one impacting democracy by saying we cannot survive if we keep current democratic rules. You can have the best argument for improving society by limiting who is allowed to vote, what things you're allowed to vote on, and what facts you are allowed to talk about. It can even be a true argument that would make everyone better off. But if it's less democracy, then it's anti-democratic. If you care about minorities and people generally, that's good, if you care about democracy, that's bad. The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting. The intelligence of the population has nothing to do with it.
- prewett 4y agoWell, you can also loose a democracy by governing so ineptly that the country falls apart or gets invaded. Also, Plato foresaw democracy descending to the point where people elected a dictator to bring order to the chaos, although that's covered in your post. If the population cannot/will not distinguish reality from what they wish were reality (a disease afflicting both the American left and the right, although in different areas), then the chances of inept leadership or believing the lies of leftist authoritarians or rightist authoritarians increases.
- bigbacaloa 4y agoThe US is a republic not a democracy. Representation is not proportional.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago> The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting. Or for the people in power to ignore the actual vote and do what they want to do anyway. See the large group of election deniers currently in government or running for office.
- jaybrendansmith 4y agoSo the winner in a Democracy or Republic should be the one who most successfully implements weaponized propaganda? The one who fills the airwaves and has the loudest megaphone and the money for the most ad buys? That is emphatically not what the founders of the United States intended, however much they may have initially limited the definition of a citizen. They expected the citizens to make reasoned choices, to be educated, to be well-read and to be rational actors. I highly suggest 'Common Sense' by Tom Paine.
- machina_ex_deus 4y agoI had a similar realization, and then I realized this is even worse. It's not about being duped. Getting to the truth is a really hard problem. I also suspect at this point there is fault injection. There are actors spreading false information with the intention of catching others believing it. I saw some cases where fact checkers had access to suspiciously hard to get information "disproving" a claim someone else picked up. The kind of information you're more likely to know because you created the lie in the first case. In the specific case I could even quantify the probability that they stumbled on that information (it required a choice from thousands of items, with very low probability of being the disproving item), and it had a very low probability.