The 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.
If 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.
That’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.
And, 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)
What I don’t get about these centrist takes is that even if you believe this, can you not recognize the difference in motivation and intention of the speech? For example, to me it’s wild to equate something like Democrats wanting to promote Covid safety and Republicans wanting to promote the idea that Californian elections are fraudulent. One is an earnest attempt for public good and the other is a cynical attempt to undermine democracy.
>And, as usual, "risk/threat to democracy" is used to mean "support for parties I don't like"
It can also mean highly influential support for ideologies I don't like - like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism.
> many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will
A few years ago, bog-standard content moderation was limiting the reach of enormously+reasonably unpopular ideologies like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism. Groups who were profoundly unhappy with these limits would bullhorn complaints of intentional suppression and censorship.
With the release of the Twitter Files (which exposed content moderation), it became clear that many folks were unable to differentiate between actual, long-established content moderation methods and actual directed suppression and censorship.¹
This deep misinterpretation seemed to flow from the ignorance of what content moderation looks like at scale. That core misunderstanding was often amplified and made worse when historically-moderated individuals filled in that vacuum with their long standing preconceptions.
The upshot are today's efforts to raise the visibility of far-right viewpoints thru coordinated crafted messaging² and thru actual suppression of non-right viewpoints thru new controls over platforms and thru often unaccountable misuse of governmental powers.
Our present conditions seem to well reflect and align with the article author's analysis.
"Ultranationalism" here means not having the police pre-emptively shut down a speech in a private venue because they believe the speaker might induce people to dislike becoming a hated minority in what used to be their country:
Fascism is a more complex but is basically is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology. It's adherents tend to
Exalt Their Nation and Race
Embrace and Support Authoritarian Governance
Condone Militant Nationalism and Violence
Prefer Social and Economic Regimentation
Parrot Populist Rhetoric
(credit Wikipedia, Britannica, et AL)
You can't expect anyone to take seriously warnings against not just nationalism, but ultranationalism, when it is the policy of most western governments to dismantle their national identities:
So 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.
> 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.
I 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.
No, 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.
It 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.
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.
I 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.
The 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.
> Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.
I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.
I'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 :)
Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate.
The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.
> The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
err not necessarily, mass media like the printing press, radio, television, the internet etc just increases visibility and expands people's understanding of the world, the risk to democracy is destabilizing economic conditions (extreme inequality). Social media just exacerbates this.
mass media influenced and dominated people's understanding. it didn't do as much to expand it. to expand your understanding you had to and still have to do your own research and look at things that do not have mass appeal.
There'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.
I 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.
I 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.
Any 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.
The 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.
I 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.
It’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.
Right, 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.
(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.
It'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.
> 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.
Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
Because if you are right it’s a loosing battle. The masses will always be under informed, and under educated. And the only way to inform and educate them would result very undemocratic society.
And who is going to determine which voters are sufficiently educated on the topics to be allowed to vote? Do you not see how that could become problematic, in the wrong hands?
Would you trust that power in Trump's hands? If so, would you have trusted it in Biden's?
"Keep it from getting into the wrong hands, forever" is not a workable plan. The correct plan is "the government doesn't get that power".
No, you have to pick between Biden and Trump because the leadership of the only two parties that matter in the US can't find anyone better suited (for them) for running for president.
After all, the people can only vote for the candidates that managed to end up on the voting ballot.
For the Republicans, Trump actually came out of the primary process. That is, he was actually voted on, and not just by the leadership. For the Democrats, Hillary, Biden, and Harris all came due to meddling by the leadership. They should consider knocking that off; it's not giving them good candidates.
> Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
This has been raised for decades, if not centuries.
The problem is that what is or isn't considered an educated view is /heavily/ dependent on... the political bent of the person(s) articulating the view, and the person(s) making the determination.
What's worse is that "fringe" views can often lead us to something that has previously been overlooked.
Finally - Australia has 100% compulsory voting - everyone must vote in elections, else receive a fine. That's intended to be sure that everyone is involved in providing their opinion on how the political body that's being voted on is an accurate reflection of the people being governed. What it doesn't do is force people to care, and a phenomena known as a "Donkey vote" occurs.
You can force people to attend classes educating them on civics, but you cannot force them to absorb, or even care, because, for a lot of people, politics is so repulsive - all they see is people squabbling about abstract ideas that the voters have next to no understanding how, or even if, it will affect them.
Can you give an example of a time when the biggest issue was one that people were uninformed about, not mis-informed? Because it seems to me that misinformation has been with us since ancient times, and has always dominated over simple uninformed behavior. Not a neat little quip though.
Well, the populist approach is to exploit that people are uninformed about most of the important topics and then induce fear with just one tiny topic. If people were better informed, they would see that the tiny topic didn't matter in the greater scheme.
This is such a brilliantly self-defying argument, I am honestly impressed. "If people were better informed, they wouldn't care". People are uninformed/misinformed because they care enough to listen to what they're being told, but not enough to actually go and check if things they're being told are accurate. And again, most people prefer to believe things that align with their world-view and self-interest.
> "If people were better informed, they wouldn't care"
That is not what I said. They might still care, but the point is that the elections should not be hijacked by one topic (this is not in the interest of those voters, but since they are uninformed, what do they know?) I hope that clears it up.
...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.
I think your supposition is correct. I think there is a common hypocrisy to the person craving democracy while showing revulsion at revealed preference. Many otherwise smart people can't seem to look at society without averting their eyes.
You're ignoring shaping effects though. Nobody prefers living in a deeply divided society. Instead, filter bubbles help bad actors (including foreign adversaries, disgruntled losers, political opportunist, and garden-variety edgelords) accelerate fractionalization. Moreover, social media deliberately elevates incendiary content because outage drives engagement.
These social media sites could be designed for consensus-building and we would see very different outcomes for society.
It's not hypocritical to want the democracy that works instead of the one that self-disintegrates.
Democracy is a tricky thing. It’s not as simple as “whatever the majority of people wants, goes”, and has always been recognized as such.
Classical liberalism requires certain rights and protections to every member of society in ways they could be perceived as “anti democratic” if for example a minority group is widely hated.
Generally speaking all of this requires some level of rules and forbearance, and a political “playing field” where disputes can be ironed out.
Part of what is required for this to work is a shared epistemology. This has historically been provided by journalist and academic elites, but it the thing that is being eroded by social media.
The problem is now everyone can choose their own reality, but that reality may just be completely not true. This was a well known phenomenon on the right but it’s happening a lot more on the left as well, with it being taken as a fact that everyone in the US is poor and struggling even though that is not true at all.
The net effect of this is that “charismatic” reactionary parties that are detached from reality perform better, because memeing wins elections better than doing things for constituents. The link was always a bit tenuous but now it’s completely broken and we’re seeing the rise of anti intellectual parties everywhere.
Probably 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.
Yes, it's just the same. Rich people once again have a disproportionally high influence in people's opinions. It's just different rich people now.
Criticizing the system on this basis won't accomplish anything. Even if you win and get rid of it, we're all just going to once again end up under the influence of rich people in whatever new system replaces it. Search for the root cause.
Right. As the source link explains at the end, one critical difference is that megacorp controlled journalism is the same for everyone, so it can't create scenarios where multiple diametrically opposed groups all simultaneously believe their views are very popular. That's much more destabilizing, because it creates issues where the status quo is unable to move at all because nobody's willing to engage in persuasion.
So 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)
These 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".
I 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.
Every 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.
> 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.
By 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.
The 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.
If 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.
That’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.
And, 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)
What I don’t get about these centrist takes is that even if you believe this, can you not recognize the difference in motivation and intention of the speech? For example, to me it’s wild to equate something like Democrats wanting to promote Covid safety and Republicans wanting to promote the idea that Californian elections are fraudulent. One is an earnest attempt for public good and the other is a cynical attempt to undermine democracy.
>And, as usual, "risk/threat to democracy" is used to mean "support for parties I don't like"
It can also mean highly influential support for ideologies I don't like - like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism.
> many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will
A few years ago, bog-standard content moderation was limiting the reach of enormously+reasonably unpopular ideologies like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism. Groups who were profoundly unhappy with these limits would bullhorn complaints of intentional suppression and censorship.
With the release of the Twitter Files (which exposed content moderation), it became clear that many folks were unable to differentiate between actual, long-established content moderation methods and actual directed suppression and censorship.¹
This deep misinterpretation seemed to flow from the ignorance of what content moderation looks like at scale. That core misunderstanding was often amplified and made worse when historically-moderated individuals filled in that vacuum with their long standing preconceptions.
The upshot are today's efforts to raise the visibility of far-right viewpoints thru coordinated crafted messaging² and thru actual suppression of non-right viewpoints thru new controls over platforms and thru often unaccountable misuse of governmental powers.
Our present conditions seem to well reflect and align with the article author's analysis.
¹ https://www.techdirt.com/tag/twitter-files/
² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo
"Ultranationalism" here means not having the police pre-emptively shut down a speech in a private venue because they believe the speaker might induce people to dislike becoming a hated minority in what used to be their country:
https://x.com/RealJarTaylor/status/2062546762666303701 (This user used to be banned on Twitter, and is still banned on Facebook, and by credit card networks. That never prompted any "risk to democracy" articles.)
"Fascism" means not barring your citizens from leaving their country to attend the wrong kind of political gathering: https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/maxim...
"Authoritarianism" means not explicitly directing police to discriminate against whites: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/31/two-tier-police-...
Ultranationalism means what it means. It is "an extremist form of nationalism characterized by radical loyalty and devotion to one's own nation".
ref: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ultranationalism
Fascism is a more complex but is basically is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology. It's adherents tend to
You can't expect anyone to take seriously warnings against not just nationalism, but ultranationalism, when it is the policy of most western governments to dismantle their national identities:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10055613...
So 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.
> 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.
I 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.
No, 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.
It 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.
> 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.
I 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.
The 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.
With social media everyone can choose their own adventure
isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?
Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.
Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.
> Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.
I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.
before mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.
I'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 :)
Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate. The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.
> The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
err not necessarily, mass media like the printing press, radio, television, the internet etc just increases visibility and expands people's understanding of the world, the risk to democracy is destabilizing economic conditions (extreme inequality). Social media just exacerbates this.
mass media influenced and dominated people's understanding. it didn't do as much to expand it. to expand your understanding you had to and still have to do your own research and look at things that do not have mass appeal.
If that's what they mean, fully agreed.
Isn’t the title inappropriate then? Shouldn’t it include “social media”?
I 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.
There'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.
Thanks, saved me a read.
Don’t thank that. Read it yourself.
I 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.
And 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?
And the feeds are largely the way they are due to unregulated greed.
There is a different root cause then, perhaps.
I 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.
Do 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).
I was going to give an archive.is link, but they're blocked too.
Any 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.
The 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.
I 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.
It’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.
Right, 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.
Why 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.
It'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.
> 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.
The danger to democracy has always been uninformed voters.
Now it is mis-informed voters.
Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
Because if you are right it’s a loosing battle. The masses will always be under informed, and under educated. And the only way to inform and educate them would result very undemocratic society.
Educated is not the same axis as informed
Correct, the word “and” is a coordinating conjunction. It joins two parallel adjectives. They’re related, but they’re not the same axis.
And who is going to determine which voters are sufficiently educated on the topics to be allowed to vote? Do you not see how that could become problematic, in the wrong hands?
Would you trust that power in Trump's hands? If so, would you have trusted it in Biden's?
"Keep it from getting into the wrong hands, forever" is not a workable plan. The correct plan is "the government doesn't get that power".
because of uneducated people we need to pick between Biden and Trump
No, you have to pick between Biden and Trump because the leadership of the only two parties that matter in the US can't find anyone better suited (for them) for running for president.
After all, the people can only vote for the candidates that managed to end up on the voting ballot.
For the Republicans, Trump actually came out of the primary process. That is, he was actually voted on, and not just by the leadership. For the Democrats, Hillary, Biden, and Harris all came due to meddling by the leadership. They should consider knocking that off; it's not giving them good candidates.
> Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
This has been raised for decades, if not centuries.
The problem is that what is or isn't considered an educated view is /heavily/ dependent on... the political bent of the person(s) articulating the view, and the person(s) making the determination.
What's worse is that "fringe" views can often lead us to something that has previously been overlooked.
Finally - Australia has 100% compulsory voting - everyone must vote in elections, else receive a fine. That's intended to be sure that everyone is involved in providing their opinion on how the political body that's being voted on is an accurate reflection of the people being governed. What it doesn't do is force people to care, and a phenomena known as a "Donkey vote" occurs.
You can force people to attend classes educating them on civics, but you cannot force them to absorb, or even care, because, for a lot of people, politics is so repulsive - all they see is people squabbling about abstract ideas that the voters have next to no understanding how, or even if, it will affect them.
Voters have always been misinformed, only the degree varied. And most of them decide to believe the things they want to believe anyhow.
the tragedy of allowing stupid people to vote.
pick one:
- stupid people vote without understanding what they vote for
- stupid people don't vote, but it's not a democracy anymore
Can you give an example of a time when the biggest issue was one that people were uninformed about, not mis-informed? Because it seems to me that misinformation has been with us since ancient times, and has always dominated over simple uninformed behavior. Not a neat little quip though.
Well, the populist approach is to exploit that people are uninformed about most of the important topics and then induce fear with just one tiny topic. If people were better informed, they would see that the tiny topic didn't matter in the greater scheme.
This is such a brilliantly self-defying argument, I am honestly impressed. "If people were better informed, they wouldn't care". People are uninformed/misinformed because they care enough to listen to what they're being told, but not enough to actually go and check if things they're being told are accurate. And again, most people prefer to believe things that align with their world-view and self-interest.
> "If people were better informed, they wouldn't care"
That is not what I said. They might still care, but the point is that the elections should not be hijacked by one topic (this is not in the interest of those voters, but since they are uninformed, what do they know?) I hope that clears it up.
"mis-informed" meaning "not sanctioned by the Ministry of Truth"
There is truth
...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.
Not everything that is true and important can be directly observed and understood by everyone. Expertise is impotent.
> The algos optimize for engagement
That's what we're told, anyways
It isn't too unreasonable to think about that there might be an invisible thumb on the scales for any of these algorithms
In the case of X, obviously. For Google and meta, I doubt it.
I think your supposition is correct. I think there is a common hypocrisy to the person craving democracy while showing revulsion at revealed preference. Many otherwise smart people can't seem to look at society without averting their eyes.
Edit: Grammar.
You're ignoring shaping effects though. Nobody prefers living in a deeply divided society. Instead, filter bubbles help bad actors (including foreign adversaries, disgruntled losers, political opportunist, and garden-variety edgelords) accelerate fractionalization. Moreover, social media deliberately elevates incendiary content because outage drives engagement.
These social media sites could be designed for consensus-building and we would see very different outcomes for society.
It's not hypocritical to want the democracy that works instead of the one that self-disintegrates.
Facts and reasoned debate come before democracy.
Certainly they do, but only until democracy forces the hemlock down their throat.
Democracy is a tricky thing. It’s not as simple as “whatever the majority of people wants, goes”, and has always been recognized as such.
Classical liberalism requires certain rights and protections to every member of society in ways they could be perceived as “anti democratic” if for example a minority group is widely hated.
Generally speaking all of this requires some level of rules and forbearance, and a political “playing field” where disputes can be ironed out.
Part of what is required for this to work is a shared epistemology. This has historically been provided by journalist and academic elites, but it the thing that is being eroded by social media.
The problem is now everyone can choose their own reality, but that reality may just be completely not true. This was a well known phenomenon on the right but it’s happening a lot more on the left as well, with it being taken as a fact that everyone in the US is poor and struggling even though that is not true at all.
The net effect of this is that “charismatic” reactionary parties that are detached from reality perform better, because memeing wins elections better than doing things for constituents. The link was always a bit tenuous but now it’s completely broken and we’re seeing the rise of anti intellectual parties everywhere.
When people say "democracy" these days they really mean something closer to "technocracy". (Often they mean technocracy, laundered through democracy)
Would 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.
Probably 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.
Mainstream narrative-shapers concerned that they are losing control of the narrative. Film at 11.
The article is literally about how megacorp controlled algorithms are shaping our politics and this is your take away?
As opposed to megacorp controlled journalism, newspapers, radio and television channels?
We should march head-first into a new exciting bad thing without question because the other bad thing was bad.
Incredible argument
Your criticism of the "new bad thing" holds absolutely no water. It's just more of the same, but with different players and different methods.
>more of the same >different players and different methods
doesn't really sound the same to me but I guess we can just agree to disagree
Yes, it's just the same. Rich people once again have a disproportionally high influence in people's opinions. It's just different rich people now.
Criticizing the system on this basis won't accomplish anything. Even if you win and get rid of it, we're all just going to once again end up under the influence of rich people in whatever new system replaces it. Search for the root cause.
Right. As the source link explains at the end, one critical difference is that megacorp controlled journalism is the same for everyone, so it can't create scenarios where multiple diametrically opposed groups all simultaneously believe their views are very popular. That's much more destabilizing, because it creates issues where the status quo is unable to move at all because nobody's willing to engage in persuasion.
The algorithms that are fed the output of the population?
What is this even supposed to mean?
It is considerably easier to manipulate someone if you have a lot of data about them, yes.
do you believe television, radio, and print were controlled by wholesome and impartial entities?
No I didn't even imply that actually.
Exactly. Everyone has been given a voice thanks to the Internet, and they call that "risks for democracy".
If 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.
So 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)
These 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".
I 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.
Every 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.
> 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.
TL; 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!