Do not confuse the medium with the method. Recommendation systems are the root of what plagues us. Democracy was born because of the social media of its time. Social media good. Current implementations bad.
I would say that the ability for plausible-looking online personas to infiltrate and influence people's thought processes is the root of what plagues use, and a chronological feed wouldn't fix that!
I really think it's intentional. I've seen a number of people explain, self-reflectively and in detail, that mainstream media outlets are bad because they don't spend enough time covering various outrages and taking heated positions on issues.
Whenever I hear "social media" in statements like this, I substitute "people conversing with each other unmediated by gatekeepers".
It was nice when the only people that could publish to an audience larger than a room were "trusted sources" with some measure of respectability. Or maybe it wasn't, because I'm not sure these people were all that trustworthy to begin with. So now we have a lot of voices with megaphones and a lot of them don't think like you or I do.
I guess I prefer this world to the world where Truth is handed down by Dan Rather.
You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?
I think a lot of the issue is that in local communities a lot of what would have been direct local discussion has moved on-line, and is manipulated for "engagement".
If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy.
The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.
My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.
As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
> If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy
That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.
But people aren't communicating freely. They are being throttled, shadow banned, refused etc. In some cases these are political candidates. Since this is one of the main channels of consumption these obvious and well documented manipulations are having a massive impact on political outcomes.
1990s IRC, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger were wild places. I don't know if those are considered social media. It's anonymous global Internet communications people have no fear of reprecussions. It's like a person in a riot throwing a rock there is no control and no fear.
Fake news has been harming democracy since democracy was invented. Remember those indian scalpings? Mostly made up by Benjamin Franklin to rally support for colonial gov.
If anything social media is a benefit to democracy vs. legacy media because it dilutes the power of any one voice, it's very hard to control all social media whereas a couple conglomerates now own nearly all of legacy media.
Looked at another way, if democracy cannot withstand social media and made up stories then it's not a stable system of government. Stories of the end of history are greatly exaggerated, historically democracy is far less successful than autocracy, perhaps due to this issue.
a hallmark of fascism and dictatorships is the capture of media, and the censorship of it.
i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.
Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.
Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.
Sure, but it's become a major issue with social media too because of the ease and ability to amplify things that aren't even something major or regional media would cover and profitable media still has some incentive to not be completely inaccurate because of liability. Now you can have the dumbest people with no concern for liability, because they own nothing and don't really have any source of income, making factually inaccurate AI assisted posts, videos, images, etc that inflame the general public who do no verification or fact checking.
Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.
Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.
Is it ‘harming democracy’, or merely exposing a system of theatrics & ceremony intended to masquerade as a ‘democracy’? I’m less convinced our democracy was ‘lost’ than I am its absence was long-obscured by clever elites.
20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.
What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.
and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.
No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.
> 20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
I think people that are trying to argue the "fake news have always existed" is missing the point at best (or wishful ignorance as a tech worker benefiting on outsourcing blame to others, and comfortably giving themselves at the next EA donation meetup).
The history of media have always had an disruption and people taking advantage of it: printing machine was a disruption that caused people like Martin Luther to be able to reach to prominence (printing press was initially printing more short news/tabloid letter, wayy more than books or proper news. And it was majority fake news). Another disruption was the radio. Made people with good, passionate voice being able to take advantage of it (Hitler, that US crazy pastor I can't remember the name of). It's up to your own moral compass if those disruption was good or bad, but they all followed by regulators realizing the potential danger of it, and putting guardrails.
But that's not the point. The point is scale. You have finite bandwidth to process information and unlike some queue system on a computer that will just lag or overflow, as a human you'll start to behave differently and it affects your information processing capacity. Doubly so if that queue is artificially filled (biased) with certain information (attention grabbing, outrage seeking algorithms)
People saying "fake news always existed" is saying "quantity doesn't matter". They're essentially saying: "school math test have always had 10+ multiplication table memorization questions. Why are people whining that they have to do 1e6 questions on one sitting??" which is ironic because techies are the first to say SCALE SCALE SCALE SCALE as an crucial strength and differentiator of software.
Appeal to history is the favorite Fallacy of techies (at least on HN) fueled by some American libertarian delusion of thinking social dynamics can be ignored.
It's pretty clear to me that those kind of techies clearly can't even conceive the problem, so don't be surprised that people are shifting to regulators to tackle this
People saying "fake news always existed" are trying to explain that the quantity of it is not so different as many modern commentaries seem to think. 25 years ago, the kind people Tweeting about how protests are satanic weren't stewing in impotence, they were writing church leaflets about how Pokemon and the New World Order were satanic.
The term democracy doesn't strictly apply to most countries in the article. It's doubtful that social media has any effect on democracy or election outcomes, negative or otherwise. In fact, there's evidence (e.g., The Golden Rule) to suggest that even voters have little to no effect on what policy governs their lives in these countries.
Do not confuse the medium with the method. Recommendation systems are the root of what plagues us. Democracy was born because of the social media of its time. Social media good. Current implementations bad.
I miss chronological feeds.
I would say that the ability for plausible-looking online personas to infiltrate and influence people's thought processes is the root of what plagues use, and a chronological feed wouldn't fix that!
I agree the world was better with chronological feeds.
But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.
So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.
When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.
Didn't the US have a very vibrant culture of highly partisan outrage papers and pamphlets in the 19th century?
Agreed, the state of social media today is basically a result of market failure.
"prefer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
it is intentional, or is it engineered?
Worse, data-driven. They researched what fat people preferred and concluded they prefer fat.
I really think it's intentional. I've seen a number of people explain, self-reflectively and in detail, that mainstream media outlets are bad because they don't spend enough time covering various outrages and taking heated positions on issues.
Whenever I hear "social media" in statements like this, I substitute "people conversing with each other unmediated by gatekeepers".
It was nice when the only people that could publish to an audience larger than a room were "trusted sources" with some measure of respectability. Or maybe it wasn't, because I'm not sure these people were all that trustworthy to begin with. So now we have a lot of voices with megaphones and a lot of them don't think like you or I do.
I guess I prefer this world to the world where Truth is handed down by Dan Rather.
You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?
I think a lot of the issue is that in local communities a lot of what would have been direct local discussion has moved on-line, and is manipulated for "engagement".
If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy.
The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.
My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.
This is way too much, nobody is saying democracy bad
We don’t even have democracy
Switzerland has a democracy
The Mega guy is doing a lot for democracy by lobbying for direct democracy in NZ
We don’t even have online voting in 2026, despite the government being able to verify you for other online services
I don’t know what to call what we have
By what metric has it worked well?
As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
> If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy
That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.
It's hardly the "freely communicating" part that's harming democracy. I find it hard to believe you're making this argument in good faith.
But people aren't communicating freely. They are being throttled, shadow banned, refused etc. In some cases these are political candidates. Since this is one of the main channels of consumption these obvious and well documented manipulations are having a massive impact on political outcomes.
Absolutely, even here it’s all infiltrated by china
1990s IRC, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger were wild places. I don't know if those are considered social media. It's anonymous global Internet communications people have no fear of reprecussions. It's like a person in a riot throwing a rock there is no control and no fear.
Fake news has been harming democracy since democracy was invented. Remember those indian scalpings? Mostly made up by Benjamin Franklin to rally support for colonial gov.
If anything social media is a benefit to democracy vs. legacy media because it dilutes the power of any one voice, it's very hard to control all social media whereas a couple conglomerates now own nearly all of legacy media.
Looked at another way, if democracy cannot withstand social media and made up stories then it's not a stable system of government. Stories of the end of history are greatly exaggerated, historically democracy is far less successful than autocracy, perhaps due to this issue.
a hallmark of fascism and dictatorships is the capture of media, and the censorship of it.
i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.
Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.
Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.
Spoiler it’s not social media anymore, it’s just media.
It's also not democracy, and never has been (with rare exceptions).
Sure, but it's become a major issue with social media too because of the ease and ability to amplify things that aren't even something major or regional media would cover and profitable media still has some incentive to not be completely inaccurate because of liability. Now you can have the dumbest people with no concern for liability, because they own nothing and don't really have any source of income, making factually inaccurate AI assisted posts, videos, images, etc that inflame the general public who do no verification or fact checking.
Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.
Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.
The cynicism in these comments is proving their point.
Is it ‘harming democracy’, or merely exposing a system of theatrics & ceremony intended to masquerade as a ‘democracy’? I’m less convinced our democracy was ‘lost’ than I am its absence was long-obscured by clever elites.
20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.
What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.
and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.
No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.
It sounds more like too much democracy, riling up and playing to the angry crowd. Plato spoke of this.
> 20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
lol
I think people that are trying to argue the "fake news have always existed" is missing the point at best (or wishful ignorance as a tech worker benefiting on outsourcing blame to others, and comfortably giving themselves at the next EA donation meetup).
The history of media have always had an disruption and people taking advantage of it: printing machine was a disruption that caused people like Martin Luther to be able to reach to prominence (printing press was initially printing more short news/tabloid letter, wayy more than books or proper news. And it was majority fake news). Another disruption was the radio. Made people with good, passionate voice being able to take advantage of it (Hitler, that US crazy pastor I can't remember the name of). It's up to your own moral compass if those disruption was good or bad, but they all followed by regulators realizing the potential danger of it, and putting guardrails.
But that's not the point. The point is scale. You have finite bandwidth to process information and unlike some queue system on a computer that will just lag or overflow, as a human you'll start to behave differently and it affects your information processing capacity. Doubly so if that queue is artificially filled (biased) with certain information (attention grabbing, outrage seeking algorithms)
People saying "fake news always existed" is saying "quantity doesn't matter". They're essentially saying: "school math test have always had 10+ multiplication table memorization questions. Why are people whining that they have to do 1e6 questions on one sitting??" which is ironic because techies are the first to say SCALE SCALE SCALE SCALE as an crucial strength and differentiator of software.
Appeal to history is the favorite Fallacy of techies (at least on HN) fueled by some American libertarian delusion of thinking social dynamics can be ignored.
It's pretty clear to me that those kind of techies clearly can't even conceive the problem, so don't be surprised that people are shifting to regulators to tackle this
People saying "fake news always existed" are trying to explain that the quantity of it is not so different as many modern commentaries seem to think. 25 years ago, the kind people Tweeting about how protests are satanic weren't stewing in impotence, they were writing church leaflets about how Pokemon and the New World Order were satanic.
Inform but also misinform
When people don't learn to use tech, it's used against them by those seeking fun, power and profit.
I think that removes agency and responsibility from the public.
The truth is that people like outrage and outrageous content.
Boring, even handed content does not get engagement.
We have to call out human nature to be able to reckon with it.
The term democracy doesn't strictly apply to most countries in the article. It's doubtful that social media has any effect on democracy or election outcomes, negative or otherwise. In fact, there's evidence (e.g., The Golden Rule) to suggest that even voters have little to no effect on what policy governs their lives in these countries.