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The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
- cjs_ac 4mo agoBy 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.
- goda90 4mo agoAnd the feeds are largely the way they are due to unregulated greed.
- rapnie 4mo agoThere is a different root cause then, perhaps.
- BackacheDescent 4mo agoIsn’t the title inappropriate then? Shouldn’t it include “social media”?
- eapressoandcats 4mo agoI think the implication is that the architecture of the internet inevitably leads to social media companies driving for maximum engagement. It’s definitely not explicitly stated though.
- wg0 4mo agoIf that's what they mean, fully agreed.
- slg 4mo agoThe problem is more specifically "algorithmic feeds" which isn't require by or exclusive to social media. For example, news sites and media sites like Youtube and Spotify (which arguably have social aspects, but most people don't use them like social media) also contribute in similar ways. The root problem is the algorithm optimizing for attention mixing with human nature that tends to make negative reactions more powerful than positive reactions which causes the algorithms to create a sort of polarization death spiral.
- jason_oster 4mo agoIf we are going to be pedantic, let's do it correctly. The specific, direct problem is advertising, where the money flows. Algorithmic feeds are designed to capture attention, and the reason for attention capture is eyes on advertisements. Having identified the true root of the problem, I would recommend directing resources towards dismantling advertising. Focusing on anything else is wasted effort.
- slg 4mo agoThat’s not the root. The root is capitalism’s need for constant growth. You can still create a successful business via advertising without the need to turn to algorithmic attention maximizing feeds if the only goal was serving customers and keeping workers employed. The problem is that whoever put up the capital to start the business is unlikely to be satisfied with that. This is why independent media and worker owned media is seeing a rise in popularity. Sustainability is obviously much easier to achieve than perpetual growth.
- bit-anarchist 4mo agoYou can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth. Also, capitalism doesn't need perpetual growth either (anymore than other system, that is). Independent and worker-owned media are still facets of capitalism, for starters.
- setopt 4mo ago> You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth. That sounds self-contradicting. How do you define «sustainability» in that case?
- bit-anarchist 4mo agoThe property of preserving/sustaining itself.
- plastic-enjoyer 4mo agoI think there’s too much focus on the internet and social media here. We should look back to the printing press as the origin and mass media, and trace the development through to radio and television. The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
- eapressoandcats 4mo agoThe thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content. This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neutral, but it generally limited how “out there” stuff could be especially since you need a fairly broad audience and everyone had to see the same things. With social media everyone can choose their own adventure, and create their own alternate realities, and that doesn’t prevent the social media companies from scaling.
- lukas221 4mo agobefore mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.
- patcon 4mo agoI've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs. As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds) So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 4mo agoIt goes beyond that. Even chat platforms can be a problem now. IMO, I'm no sociologist but I'd love the viewpoint of one, human societies were very much non flat in terms of information, and cheap infinite internet collapsed the thin hierarchical nature of information-sharing and communication.
- quotemstr 4mo ago> Even chat platforms can be a problem now. A problem for whom? If a form of government requires someone, somewhere, to prevent people talking to each other, this form of government is illegitimate. Period. The end.
- iamnothere 4mo agoI can’t believe you are downvoted. The enemies of free speech and association are out in force in this thread. What is even the purpose of a government if not to guarantee the rights of its people?
- agumonkey 4mo agofor the people themselves, i'm not thinking about political power wishing to control minds, simply the way human communication might fail when everything is flat (and again, i'm just a simple nerd, not a researcher). what used to be local is now global, a bad idea in a village can find resonnance in other places, people start to convince themselves. the depth of information is also reduced (see how every puppet candidate is using tiktok snippets to appear charming)
- intended 4mo agoWhat? We interfere with terror cells and criminal communication whenever we can. What is this absolute line in the sand you are drawing.
- didntcheck 4mo agoAnd, as usual, "risk/threat to democracy" is used to mean "support for parties I don't like" It wasn't long ago that the Twitter shoe was on the other foot, and many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will (with no hint of irony regarding their alleged ideological views on private companies)
- hilariously 4mo agoSo the question isn't "Do I like this party?" The question is "Are democratic institutions, elections, courts, and constitutional limits being respected?" That's a standard that can be applied to anyone, regardless of party. Both siding things because the biden admin made people mad about twitter is frankly disgusting.
- mschuster91 4mo ago> The question is "Are democratic institutions, elections, courts, and constitutional limits being respected?" That's a standard that can be applied to anyone, regardless of party. The thing is, sometimes the decisions of (other) democratic countries can be pretty braindead. The UK and its age verification nonsense, Spain and its holy crusade against La Liga stream pirates, the US and anything to do with abortions/LGBT/Black people/whatever the book ban lunatics are trying to push today, Germany's infamous "Pimmelgate" and "Mehrzweckeier" scandals... Suddenly, the question really is, whose laws to follow to what degree.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoI don't think that is the question, and in the absence of algorithmic social media feeds I don't think anyone would consider it to be. Pimmelgate was a dispute for Germans to resolve under German law; it's absurd if anyone outside of Germany feels entitled to have an opinion about it.
- hilariously 4mo agoNo, it isn't - the US doesn't really have strong anti-discrimination laws and is not enforcing them with the current administration, the EEOC is mostly toothless, and I repeat, both siding things like "DEI" or "age verification" as bad as "throwing out elections" is disgusting and are not comparable.
- leoc 4mo agoThere's no clean separation between those things. The weakness and inadequacy of HTTP(S) and other protocols actively funnels people into the centralised services of big providers. It creates a world where storage is brittle and content is ephemeral, both directly due to its own failings and because it pushes people towards big providers who increasingly like things that way; and so on. Now human nature would be enough to tend to draw a lot of people towards lowest-common-denominator options, but a system which makes the alternatives frictionful and downright painful doesn't help either.
- LAC-Tech 4mo agoAnd by democracy they mean... people agreeing with each other and voting for the correct parties: broadband reduced civic participation, eroded social trust, and boosted voting for extreme-right and populist parties in Italy and Germany. Is the "extreme-right" party in Germany still chaired by a brown lesbian woman?
- protocolture 4mo agoThanks, saved me a read.
- rbanffy 4mo agoDon’t thank that. Read it yourself.
- protocolture 4mo agoI was all ready to read a story about how BGP and TCP/IP are a bad fit for democracy. I dont care about social media algorithms, as far as I am concerned its settled that they suck. Its also not "The architecture of the internet" in any way shape or form.
- rbanffy 4mo ago“The Internet” is more than its low-level transport layer.
- protocolture 4mo agoYou might be conflating "The Internet" with "The Web" which is common. And the OP article specifically says "Architecture". The architecture of a building is not a seat at a table inside the building, even if the building contains it.
- rbanffy 4mo agoI’d say “The Internet” includes “The Web” and when someone refers to its “architecture”, it can be a number of different things. If they wanted to be specific about the low level plumbing, they would probably use the proper names for the protocols and systems. And, sometimes, the architect of a building also designs the furniture and other equipment. Oscar Niemeyer’s headquarters of the French Communist Party is a great example of that, where the architect went on to design the building’siconic chairs.
- userbinator 4mo ago[flagged]
- mbrumlow 4mo ago[flagged]
- customguy 4mo agoWho is "they"? "Science" (the publication)? What is "the" narrative? Can you name even one thing "Science" previously dictated the huddled masses, that they now heroically broke free from, thanks to the interwebs?
- throwaway_95283 4mo agomost of the COVID public health science that appeared on TV, the internet allowed people to evaluate whether actual science contradicted what the government said was science, and freed them from lockdowns that were pointless, or taking vaccines which were claimed to prevent getting or transmitting covid and allowed people to evaluate them based on the factual risks / rewards. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/546234-cdc-reverses-statement-by-director-that-vaccinated-people-are-no/ https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/546234-cdc-r... https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-coronaviruses-confer-robust-natural-immunity-government-officials-should-have-considered-in-policy-decisions/ https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-coronavi... https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-2021-video-saying-vaccinations-prevent-covid-resurfaces-1726900 https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-2021-video-saying-vaccina...
- lokar 4mo agoDo you have any thoughtful substantive critiques?
- userbinator 4mo agoThe article is not worth reading the moment it complains about political bias in either direction.
- mbrumlow 4mo ago> Those algorithmic biases have demonstrable behavioral consequences. The algos optimize for engagement, which can roughly translate into the people drive the algos, as they would stop watching or visiting or commenting, if it was not something they wanted to engage in. So in some ways, is this not democracy to the max? I wonder if articles like these don’t like the outcomes, or the reflection of society that the algos create. And thus attack them, because they would rather curate and limit conversation and expressions on the internet they don’t like or agree with.
- amelius 4mo agoThe danger to democracy has always been uninformed voters. Now it is mis-informed voters.
- userbinator 4mo ago"mis-informed" meaning "not sanctioned by the Ministry of Truth"
- lokar 4mo agoThere is truth
- userbinator 4mo ago...and it's what people have seen in real life with their own eyes, not what the government wants them to see. The Internet has made the former far more accessible to the population.
- lokar 4mo agoNot everything that is true and important can be directly observed and understood by everyone. Expertise is impotent.
- 4mo ago
- TimTheTinker 4mo agoWhy not: (1) directly fund studies and reproductions of studies (promising ahead of time to publish the results, even if negative) targeting the exact issues they're concerned about (2) writing and publishing extensively to show people the results and help them arrive at a correct interpretation of the data (3) make a public commitment ahead of time to change opinion based on what the data says, and not to overstate underdetermined theses ... instead of spending money trying to control the political narrative? That would simply be science doing science -- which has always threatened the establishment because it's accountable to reality, not authority. Science rightly done never claims authority, just reports on what the data says. Truth is powerful enough on its own.
- Velocifyer 4mo agoI couldn't read this article because Science.org left Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode enabled in their Cloudflare settings, causing me to be blocked by a “security verification”. If you use Cloudflare, disable bot stop modes by going to dash.cloudflare.com and selecting your domain and then clicking on “Security” and then clicking on “Settings” and then using the buttons to disable Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode.
- himata4113 4mo agoI was going to give an archive.is link, but they're blocked too.
- Velocifyer 4mo agoArchive.is is malware. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-might-blacklist-archive-today-after-site-maintainer-ddosed-a-blog/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-might-... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
- HDBaseT 4mo agoDo you know what sort of browser configuration triggers the Bot Flight Mode detection? I'm not using anything too esoteric (Firefox Developer Edition, highly tweaked + extensions).
- TiredOfLife 4mo agoIn 99% of cases it's auto deletion of cookies.
- dlcarrier 4mo agoMy experience with dead internet theory isn't that bots are making the internet unusable, it's that anti-bot measures are making the internet unusable. It's like antivirus software, all over again, except this time I don't get choose whether or not to run it.
- flight327 4mo agoSo do the limitations (and requirements) of hardware and operating systems. And corporations and billionaires financing and supporting antidemocratic systems and politicians. Modern smartphones could easily be meshnet nodes, but they don't really support P2P networking. See: FireChat, Bitchat (removed from the Chinese app store), Airdrop (Apple limited its functionality in China)
- chromatin 4mo ago[flagged]
- userbinator 4mo agoExactly. Everyone has been given a voice thanks to the Internet, and they call that "risks for democracy".
- thomassmith65 4mo agoIf the government added an 'abolish all future elections?' item to every ballot, it would be more democratic, and also a risk to democracy. Everyone has a voice now, but the hysterical, shouting voices drown out the calm ones.
- javascriptfan69 4mo agoThe article is literally about how megacorp controlled algorithms are shaping our politics and this is your take away?
- vitalyan1234 4mo agodo you believe television, radio, and print were controlled by wholesome and impartial entities?
- javascriptfan69 4mo agoNo I didn't even imply that actually.
- userbinator 4mo agoThe algorithms that are fed the output of the population?
- javascriptfan69 4mo agoWhat is this even supposed to mean? It is considerably easier to manipulate someone if you have a lot of data about them, yes.
- tptacek 4mo agoAny story about threats by the Internet to democracy that revolve around Twitter has to account for the fact that only a minute portion of the electorate ever looks at Twitter.
- himata4113 4mo agoI couldn't agree more. One day I uninstalled twitter(x) and I just kinda forgot about it. A couple of times I tried to look at where the icon used to be and never really felt the urge to reinstall. I like to think that I am not alone in this and this happened to hundreds of thousands of people. When you overly optimize for engagement at some point you cause burnout and loss of interest. It felt funny seeing musk claim that all twitter statistics were going up without realizing the cost of it. Social media has to strike a very strong balance to keep you engaged, but not too engaged.
- javascriptfan69 4mo agoThe article mentions basically all major social media though. Besides, even if it was just about twitter, it can only take a small portion of the population to swing an election. Word of mouth is also downstream from twitter. People might not see something on twitter, but they might hear it from someone who saw it there.
- rbanffy 4mo agoIt’s not about social networks but algorithmic feeds. The same issues pop up with YouTube or any other website that shows you content that it thinks is more likely to engage your attention.
- tptacek 4mo agoRight, I get that, but the article is heavily weighted towards examples of Elon Musk and the Republicans colluding to shape specifically the feed on Twitter. I agree that it's bad that's happened (in the sense of Twitter is now a much less credible platform as a result), but, again, if you're talking about destabilizing entire democracies you have to account for the fact that Musk has direct influence only over a social network very few people pay attention to.
- cynicalsecurity 4mo agoTL; DR: Develop and deploy algorithms that downrank or deprioritize anti-democratic, extremist, or polarizing content. Just call your opponents anti-democratic, extremist or polarising and here you go. Democracy!
- quotemstr 4mo agoEvery single one of these "internet is a threat to our democracy" takes is really about a few things, none of which is a threat to democracy. 1) Hand-wringing about information disintermediation: previously, institutional gatekeepers filtered information and interpreted it for the public. Now, the public sees raw information and forms its own judgements. 2) Social media has cut revenue streams for the sorts of organizations that bleat non-stop about how social media is a thread. 3) Weakening of ability of the institutional class to censor defectors and promulgators of inconvenient facts, which disaffected former censors call "disinformation". Far from being a threat to "democracy", the internet is the best thing that's ever happened to it. Social media and the internet more broadly have enabled an unprecedented increase in breadth and depth of public participation in the marketplace of ideas. Those who don't like the result never liked democracy. It's exhausting, this ceaseless cacophony of high-minded bullshit. I'm sick and tired of hearing people exclaim that the internet is a danger to "democracy" when, really, the problem is that the internet produces democratic outcomes they don't like.
- techblueberry 4mo ago> Hand-wringing about information disintermediation: previously, institutional gatekeepers filtered information and interpreted it for the public. Now, the public sees raw information and forms its own judgements. I mean is the information raw really? How raw was #metoo or would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. The internet is super-curated. There’s like super obscure intellectual woke all over x/twitter; The opposite of raw, that’s what people like about it! Raw would be a _substantial_ improvement over the like bizarrely curated shit we have everywhere now.
- leoc 4mo agoIt's not a panacea or a magic fix for human nature, but one of the root causes of this is that the underlying architecture of the HTTP(S) Web is just inadequate. The world needs (technically viable and widely-used systems of) content-addressable storage: inherently achivable, mirrorable and recoverable, properly supporting intermittent connections, providing the stability which is the necessary (though not sufficient) base for building things like annotations and back-linking. That certainly can't force people not to choose the laziest and stupid options, but it really can't hurt if at least the underlying technology doesn't make doing anything but the laziest and stupidest thing inherently hard, esoteric and unrewarding. Instead we've created TV on the computer from the visionary Doug Engelbart manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. Worse, some people still seem to be trying to pat themselves on the back for the supposed pragmatism and savviness of those decisions, even while at the same time using their other hand to wave a fist at the Big Tech incumbents, content farms and grifters which they gave a structural advantage to. There aren't many things which should be a higher priority, and which are a bigger blocker of general improvement, than the continuing lack of widely adopted and widely adoptable content-addressable storage. Need to do something big about that, folks, and promptly.
- like_any_other 4mo agoThese studies of what is suppressed on social media somehow always overlook that Facebook bans all white nationalist content, or the purges of right-wingers from reddit. Censorship the authors agree with does not "create risks for democracy".
- photochemsyn 4mo agoI really haven’t trusted Nature and Science for about two decades. These are captured entities. The value of a publication in Science or Nature is questionable. This is a consequence of the corporatization of science in academics. “Nature was, and is, a commercial enterprise, owned by the privately held company Macmillian publishers. . .” Get off the Internet, go read a book. “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Science Shook the Scientific World” - Eugene Samuel Reich. The bullshit artists are at it again.
- phs318u 4mo agoWould social media be the bane it is, if: 1. There was no algorithm tweaking your feed. Promoting something and suppressing something else. 2. Creators were not paid. 3. Advertisements were randomly allocated irrespective of the content. 4. There were no such thing as likes. 5. Users had the option to pay for an ad-free experience.
- rbanffy 4mo agoProbably yes. The misperception of general consensus would be skewed by the bubble you follow. For instance, if all the people you follow are flat earthers, you might form the perception this is a sensible point of view. Same for vaccines, the war against Iran, Cuba, and so on.
- mikewarot 4mo agoWe learned that computer security had issues during Viet Nam. The problem was studied, lessons were learned, and the problem was actually solved, about 50 years ago. Unfortunately, the PC computer wave washed interest in those solutions down the drain. Because of this, Windows, MacOS, Linux, are all insecure by design. Because of that, you can't really host your own servers on the internet, unless you're a die-hard IT guy. Because of that, the only game in town is walled gardens. Because of that, everything has to be paid for, thus the algorithm, thus the rot of society. All because we thought Unix's security model was good enough.
- entwife 4mo agoA simple improvement to existing social media would be to allow users to see other users' feeds. Just seeing things from a different perspective.
- silexia 4mo agoExtremely biased study. It assumes voting for right wing parties is naturally bad.
- mikewarot 4mo agoI think it's the architecture of the web, specifically, the fact that you can't use HTML to mark up hypertext, that is the root of it (or maybe my other thread about OS structure was right... you decide) All this morning, a thread has been building in my mind. On Twitter, you read something, and a witty come-back denying yet affirming part of the original post, and feel tempted, strongly tempted, to try to add to that cascade. It's the structure of Twitter, really. Here on HN, we try to do the same, but at least we're working with higher quality resources. The problem is that you can't weave a thread together without having to expend thousands of words to replace what should be something much simpler, using a few transclusions, to provide examples of what you mean, something much more information dense, and far less verbose. Thus, it's much easier to just try to demolish something, by pointing out its most visible flaw, in a few sentences, rather that to build up a novel observation, by crudely trying to provide context with thousands of words.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cmxch 4mo agoFor the American ideal of democracy or the European ideal of militant democracy?