Social media vastly amplifies loud minorities. Democracy assumes that the majority of people are reasonable, so majority rule will also be reasonable. Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants. This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted.
Add to that the fact that social media is highly game-able and scalable, and you have small groups of people working against the majority of the country.
Social media is also a prime playground for international enemies.
In that light, I'm moving away from the idea that all social media should be allowed, and seeing actions like this as something worth exploring. I hate imposing restrictions, but social media is a strange and unbelievably influential paradigm, which needs to be handled "like a weapon instead of some toy".
I think we need social media to operate as a non-profit like Wikipedia, and I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won't work. A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.
> And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight.
This is probably the biggest threat to democracy, and to 90% of the population
I agree and would add that the same argument stands for the traditional press as well.
otherwise, the democratic oversight will just be whatever the u.s can manage.
the internet is already falling apart; i notice many u.s media sites are inaccessible from europe. i guess national internets are less painful in europe, where almost every country has its own language, than in the anglosphere, where there are many smaller countries that use english.
it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.
It sounds like you're calling for jackbooted thugs to go and shut down newspapers. This has historically not been a sign of a society headed in a good direction.
Agreed. I think we need to transition to something like Scuttlebutt, where no one controls the network. It solves the problems of profit incentives, government intervention and policing of content all at once. I've been writing about this a lot recently at https://adecentralizedworld.com
What if the US bans them, and Britain does not. Do you want the US government to systematically control the internet to prevent US citizens from using that British websites?
The things you say are easy to say, but hard to actually make in the real world without running into many more complications.
I think the thing that has happened with social media is that we've moved even more to a sound bite and headline world. This is no critical thought or consideration. The headline said X so it is true. The "news" is willing to do anything for eyeballs. All information has become click bait to sell ads.
And restrictions won't do any good. It's the Internet. Practically, you can't stop E2EE communication at this point. Social media can become decentralized (with Mastodon and similar systems) or even p2p (with Secure Scuttlebutt). All restrictions would do would be to curtail the speech of people who don't know about them, and increase the utilization of these other social networks. Net effect: No change to the nature of speech, just to the places they happen.
I believe that's spot on, and it's essentially the same with newspapers and TV, at the very least today. 30 years ago, there was only one truth, and it was spread via mass media. Now, there are competing narratives, both in mass media and on the Internet, and everybody picks and chooses what fits into their understanding of the world.
> Net effect: No change to the nature of speech, just to the places they happen.
And the degree to which you can observe and influence what is said. If you force people to adopt secure communication en masse, you lose a lot of possibilities. I don't know how much this is a concern for governments, but I don't think that they will be able to win the crypto wars, so pushing people into secure comms by overreaching today means they will have a much harder time tomorrow. But maybe they won't be in charge tomorrow, so it's not really their problem.
When most people complain about social media they use their previous relationship to media as a benchmark for normality but centrally controlled media never really existed and is no longer strictly possible. Cheap media is always going to be attractive to cranks. Years ago it was pamphlets, AM radio, tabloids and cable news, now it's social media and email campaigns (yes, they still exist). Our relationship to media keeps changing and people learn to deal with the political discourse, disinformation and outright crankery being amplified by these platforms the same way they learned not to pick up an issue of the National Enquirer and tune out the nuts on AM radio.
I'm surprised you chose this as the prime example. I think things surrounding George Floyd protests are more apt examples (tearing down arbitrary statues, cancel culture, CHOP/CHAZ, social media mobs, etc).
Similarly, US police have been routinely murdering people for years. What social media has done is allow the creation of a "headless" protest movement that can outrun attempts to take it down.
In both cases, some people have leapt in and gone too far because they enjoy the chaos, but don't let that obscure the real issues.
No, the problem of social media is reactionary movements arising against entirely fake problems, like "pizzagate".
Historically, only the vocal minorities with money could afford to influence politicians.
Now minorities without much money can get politicians attention too?
Regarding political theoretical statements:
There are different paradigms of liberal democracy currently. Some of them can be regarded as appealing to the will of the majority for legitimacy, but essentially they don't assume that the majority are reasonable, but merely that we shall respect the will of the majority and base policies on their stance.
Disregarding illiberal democracy paradigms, all liberal democracy paradigms recognize the value of minority voices and recognize that their rights shall be protected, the right to freely express included.
Regarding the factual statements:
The mainstream US media didn't take social media as an input of significance for understanding the majority stance of US population before 2016. Those journalists had their echo chambers and represented a vocal minority in their echo chambers.
Social media, on the other hand, provides a meaningful alternative allowing some different opinion groups to express their opinions beyond the echo chambers of mainstream media. The liberal-leaning mainstream media now has a tendency to exaggerate the influence of some niche circles on social media (e.g. the so-called alt-right), though.
I started in this industry in the '90s, I like to think of my cohort as the generation who "built the Internet" (or the commercial version of it).
We've created a monster. Or at least the means to unleash it.
We now see an explosion in selfish and cowardly interactions. Good faith conversations obviously abound, but they have been effectively buried under co-opted hysteria.
Media is a "pillar" of democracy. I think social media destabilized that pillar.
Dewey Defeats Truman.
Legacy media boundaries are dictated by advertisers.
A millennia old truth: take care of the politics, or politics will take care of you
It's a good thing that power in democracies is determined by secret ballot and not likes on social media then!
Some people liken Section 230 to being the First Amendment of the Internet, and they’re not far off. That doesn’t mean social media isn’t dangerous, but fire is dangerous. Print is still dangerous. Guns are dangerous. There’s a lot of dangerous things out there, so where do you want to draw the line? We’re not very good at dealing with social media as a society yet, but you don’t develop antibodies to this crap without first exposing yourself to it.
Including loud minorities that own most of the newspapers, television networks, radio networks, publishing concerns, banks, movie distributors, etc.
> ... obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants
Ain't that the truth.
I presume you're referring to the 2016 presidential election in the US, and if so that's patently false. FiveThirtyEight estimated a ~28% probability[0] that Trump would win, and other major media outlets had similar outlooks prior to the election. Many willfully interpreted "28% chance" as "with any luck it won't happen," but you can't say that the media didn't think it was possible.
[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
(edit: updated with link to actual prediction by FiveThirtyEight)
It's a democracy in terms of the electoral process, mostly... at least historically. Flawed, but the people select their leaders by election.
It's not really a democracy in terms of political culture and rights. Very weak free speech, right to organize, right to assemble, freedom of the press, etc. They jail a lot of journalists, on charges like "subliminal messages announcing the military coup."
However, it all comes down to this, what happens when people of a democratic country elect a president that has totalitarian tendencies?
Meanwhile Erdogan is set on keeping the steady flow of immigrants coming for as long as he's the gate holder, the EU will bow to many of Erdogans demands.
Concurrently Russia is said be rerunning the USSR book and is desperate in acquiring more territory. For as long as I've lived I can recall the USA being somewhat the voice of reason in these situations but USA is too occupied with their own stuff currently.
I think theirs trouble on the horizon as Erdogan and Puttins position become more and more unsustainable with the citizens of said countries being more and more unhappy with them.
Belarus is staring to realize this and look West, so did Georgia and the Ukraine. Russia is desperate not to lose all influence over these.
They were desperate to keep the Crimea. But to be fair Crimea wasn't even part of Ukraine until 1960 when Khrushchev wanted to increase is own power base. Not really Ukrainians who live there and the region was never much for Ukrainian nationalism.
Russia is desperate not to get parceled up by China, Europe and the US. Russia is declining power, its population is collapsing, it has major brain drain, half of the Russian life outside of Russia. Putin is good at seeming strong but the long term battle is basically lost already.
> USA being somewhat the voice of reason
You mean the voice with the most financial and military power that told others what do? Are you rally so naive to think that 'reasonableness' is what made these things happen?
In the 90s the Russian were sticking mad as hell about this stuff, they just didn't have the power to do anything about it. In the last 15 years the have learn that they can, so they do.
There was no such negotiations with binding promises made public aside from interwebs rumors, frequently reposted on RT/Sputnik/etc. The end of Cold War was USSR unilaterally dissolving by agreement between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
Furthermore, Yeltsin publicly said that eastern europe can join NATO if they wish. The only request was that there would be no nuclear weapon moved to new NATO members. And there were talks about limiting conventional weapons. That's why current NATO forces in Baltic states and Poland are "rotational" rather than permanent.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/18/world/yeltsin-now-seems-r...
> In the 90s the Russian were sticking mad as hell about this stuff, they just didn't have the power to do anything about it. In the last 15 years the have learn that they can, so they do.
As an ex-USSR citizen, Russia was damn friendly in early 90s. Russian SSR (separate from USSR) supported Baltic states during January events of 1991. Russian army was rather swiftly removed. Separation was rather smooth thanks to mutual understanding. Things started to change in late 90s though. Not sure where the braking point was.
But the way you and Russia talk about it shows that they still consider that to be their territory, even though it is now a different country. That attitude leads Russia to think they have a right to meddle in their former territory.
Second: Why did those countries join NATO? Because NATO held a gun to their head and told them they have to join? No, because Russia kept talking and acting in ways that made them afraid that they were going to get pressured, meddled with, invaded, and/or annexed. They wanted something bigger than their own military to protect them, so they pushed to join NATO.
All of which leaves Russia feeling surrounded and encroached upon. But the cause of that has been the Russian habit of trying to treat former territory as still their own, rather than the evil machinations of the West.
My interpretation is as following -- please correct me if I'm wrong. Note: I am not endorsing (nor criticising) Russian policies here, just trying to understand and learn. In order to learn, I try and give as clearcut an explanation as possible of my current understanding, so as to make it as easy as possible for others with more expertise to point to where I am wrong (if indeed I am wrong). My take is this: contemporary Russian policy is a variation on "spheres of influence" [1], and Russia treats its neighbours as being in its "sphere of influence", and does not accept them becoming part of NATO. I think the implicit deal with "sphere of influence" neighbours is: as long as you don't join NATO, you can do whatever you like but as soon as you try to join NATO we will stop this, including with force. Currently, Russia has borders with the following NATO countries: Norway, Estonia and Latvia. The latter two joined NATO in 2004, when Russia felt too weak to do anything about it, especially since they are not land-locked, so could be easily be defended by western Navies.
A clear example of this was the Russian-Georgian War in 2008. Russia withdrew after a couple of days (but left some "Frozen Conflicts" [2] in place that it can 'turn on' at will, as a power-lever: South Ossetia and Abkhazia). Who would have defended Georgia if Russia had decided to stay, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey? Probably not. Likewise, Russia could easily invade an keep the 'stans. Take land-locked Kazakhstan: huge, rich in resources, nearly empty, and, thanks to Stalin's policy of mixing ethnic groups, about 1/4 of the population is ethic Russian anyway (in 1989 it was nearly 40%). Who would defend Kazakhstan? Mongolia, Uzbekistan , Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan? Probably not. Ukraine is an interesting special case, and the annexation of Crimea can be interpreted in this way: Ukraine came too close to NATO, and Crimea is important for the ability of the Russian navy to project power in the Mediterranean Sea. Crimea is > 2/3 Russian from the POV of ethnic groups and Russia has a higher standard of living than Ukraine, so the majority of the Crimean population would probably have been ok with the policy anyway.
Solve for the equilibrium. We would expect federated social media to increase in popularity when the convenience of centralized social media is jeopardized. I believe in Russia, where people don't feel safe voicing their opinions publicly on centralized social media, ad hoc social networks have appeared on safe chat platforms like Telegram to take their place.
> I believe in Russia, where people don't feel safe voicing their opinions publicly on centralized social media, ad hoc social networks have appeared on safe chat platforms like Telegram to take their place.
I'm Russian. Today is the last day of 7-day voting for the very controversial constitution amendments that would grant Putin two additional 6-year terms, among other things. My both VK and Twitter feeds are chock-full of posts about this. People are posting about how asinine these amendments are. People are posting about incessant violations in the voting process itself. People are posting pictures of their ballots. The feeling that people are afraid to publicly voice their opinions is certainly not there.
But once it's on TOR, it'll be similar to the DNMs for drugs: once it's out of the bag, you can stamp out individual sites, but the system is there to stay.
Edit: my point is: starting in the late 70's, authoritarian regimes failed miserably before all over the world, therefore there's no reason to believe they'll succeed thist time. Remember Marx explaining Charles Bonaparte: history happens twice, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.
The fundamental fact is that, in the long run, autocrats are very incompetent and make a lot of mistakes, mostly by hubris and because they're surrounded by yes-men that hide them the truth. They become detached from facts, they think they can control facts until facts control them.
Erdogan's strong rule is a drug that Turkey will have to pay very dearly to get rid off.
How do you think openness and democracy triumphing cause the rise of autocrats? Are you referring to Plato's five regimes theory, where each type of government degenerates into a different government, in a cycle?
Sorry, I expressed myself badly. It doesn't "cause" it just provides a contrast that makes this look as different of what was there before.
If Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and East Asia were still under the authoritarian rulers of the Cold War era, these new autocrats wouldn't be a novelty.
My point is that autocrats failed before and all those places tried democracy. It succeeded in most of them, but a few want to go back to something that is not viable anymore.
It's clear Turkey is drifting away from the values held by the alliance members.
I'm so glad they haven't been accepted into the EU. That would be a disaster.
Thank you for discovering universal rule. If you read US/Canadian press for example you might find out that for any bad thing happening inside some evil foreign entities are responsible. Any government needs an enemy to take people's eye from their own f..k ups.
At that time though Turkey would have been a real welcome growth addition to the EU.
2005 +9% growth, the year the EU opened accession negotiations with Turkey.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Turke...
There's a reason EU countries have huge numbers of Turkish expats already despite Turkey's economy.
https://www.france24.com/en/20200701-france-suspends-role-in...
As for Germany they have been in bed with Russia for a long time, and Austria is basically one of the main conduits for laundering money coming from "bad" Russian people (who steal from the majority of the Russian population).
Just like how Poland and Hungary are EU members and they are walking their own way not giving a f about anything, rewriting the constitutions and laws as they wish
It extremely hard to do a major judicial reform which is needed. The ruling party argument is that that the system of election the supreme court is flawed. There is a risk of deep state influence from the previous system and ties to Russia.
When Germany was reunified they a purge of people with ties to DDR. Nothing like that happened in Poland.
There are mechanisms in place to change constitutions and laws in all countries. The primary function of parliament is to legislate. In Poland, Hungary and the rest of the EU.
Look at what happened with the Arab spring in Egypt... after the leaders fell, even worse parties and fundamentalist strongmen came in. It was lauded as a democratic revolution until the muslim brotherhood came in. Same shit happened in Syria -- now it's devastated.
There is so much outcry over TikTok being adopted in masse within the United States -- this isn't really that different. Facebook invests a lot of resources fighting fake news in the US -- I doubt it puts any efforts into propaganda (nor has the ability) that is spread in a place like Turkey.
The way to think about these countries behavior is -- imagine foreign governments were sending the KKK $100 of millions along with weapons across your borders. We got a taste of 1% of this with Russian interference -- but it is nothing compared to what happens in the middle east.
> "Do you see why we oppose social media like YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, and so on?" Erdogan said.
> "Turkey is not a banana republic. We will snub those who snub this country’s executive and judicial bodies," he stated.
> "We will chase those who attack a baby...," Erdogan said, referring to an insult directed at his daughter Esra Albayrak and his son-in-law, Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak upon their announcement of their newborn baby.
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/president-erdogan-vows-soc...
You say the wrong thing online in the UK or Germany, the police come knocking. Everyone always thinks their reason for censorship is exceptional because their beliefs are the one-true virtuous beliefs in the universe.
Greatness is a small number of key visionary decisions, and not a bunch of little reactive ones.
Presumably they will ignore this request as well.
Currently I have settled for a room-darkening shade.
That’s how you frame your readers. The author doesn’t know whether there’s causal relation between the possible insult and the plans to control the social platforms. But this is how media tricks the readers in thinking so.
I don't know--seems pretty clear to me.
“Do you see why we oppose social media like YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, etc...?” Erdogan asked in reference to the alleged insults of his family members. “It is imperative that these channels are brought under control.”
Again in reference to the insults:
"We experienced similar attacks in the past. The lack of monitoring on these platforms have a role in the rise of this sort of immoral behaviour. These platforms do not suit this country. We want these platforms to be banned, taken under control."
Quotes from a different article:
> "“Do you see why we oppose social media like YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, et cetera.?” Erdogan asked in reference to the alleged insults of his family members. “It is imperative that these channels are brought under control.”
> Erdogan said: “Turkey is not a banana republic. We will snub those who snub this country’s executive and judicial bodies.”"
expect to see parallels.
