[briefcomment]

In a dictatorship, cracking down on social media is a no brainer. But I think social media undermines democracies as well.

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".

[salmonfamine]

I think we're encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn't have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn't fit. 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. The fact that anyone on the so-called Left supports the rights of these corporations to wield that influence by appealing to laissez-faire principles -- ("they're private companies, they can do what the want!", "If you don't like Twitter's policies you can go start your own site!") -- is mind-boggling.

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.

[briefcomment]

Lots of worthwhile points here.

> 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

[Hoasi]

> A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.

I agree and would add that the same argument stands for the traditional press as well.

[salmonfamine]

I think before the advent of mass-media it probably worked reasonably well. A subscription-based revenue model seems to work ok.

I think a reliance on advertising is what has pushed things to the degenerated state we have now. And social media has practically dictated that reliance.

[Hoasi]

> I think a reliance on advertising is what has pushed things to the degenerated state we have now. And social media has practically dictated that reliance.

True, but the press relied on an advertising-based business model right from the start. That, in hindsight, was not such a sensible choice.

[ferzul]

so how does that work? i cannot think of a workable solution short of an end to the world wide web, and the beginning of a system of national internets and data ports (as in, places you send your data to to export them from one country and import them to another).

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.

[yodelshady]

> it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance.

Luckily for infosec professionals - we are never putting the lid back on that particular box. International businesses need the internet, just as it needs encryption. It'll only be proles facing restrictions.

I can't help but echo that I'm simply grimly fascinated by how far and fast the standard of discourse has fallen, however. And a decent chunk of that political interference, gaslighting and general verbal abuse and toxicity is from the US - "progressive" and "conservative" regions alike.

[Barrin92]

>it solves many problems - it puts an end to cyberattacks, for instance. but is it right? i doubt it.

I think it's right. Countries have sovereignty over their physical territory and they ought to have sovereignty over their digital territory, that's the basis of any democracy and self-determination.

Of course it produces awful results in Turkey because Erdogan is an autocrat, and autocrats use power to enact dumb policies, in this case censoring something because his family was insulted.

However in democracies it is necessary to not be defenseless and to maintain values. Here in Europe I've always felt that we're pretty much exposed in the digital sphere to either American norms due to sheer size, and nowadays more and more to negative campaigns by countries like Russia and China as they've learned to weaponize cyberspace.

[pasabagi]

I think cultural defensiveness is a strange phenomenon. The musical tradition that grew into jazz survived centuries of the most brutal slavery, but now it's the basis of most of what we hear in our day-to-day. Ultimately, cultural values that work will win out, and art that is beautiful will shine through. No amount of political pressure, violence, boundaries and borders can change that. You can't mandate that people should buy bratwurst, or read Horace, or go to church - but equally, if your values are good values, they can only be suppressed for some time, before they spring up in new forms and new places.

In China, they are conducting a great experiment in suppressing and controlling culture. Perhaps it will work - perhaps not, but I think you could only really achieve such a goal with such means, and moreover, I think such means are far more insidious and corrupting than any kind of foreign influence. Sheltered culture becomes irrelevant, then idiotic, then it becomes something only idiots and fossils can believe in.

[Barrin92]

> You can't mandate that people should buy bratwurst, or read Horace

of course you can. Do you know why the Breton language in France is reduced to 200k speakers and the Académie française gets to determine how French is spoken? Because the state stamped out every regional language during the creation of the Republic, and that was that.

Are the native cultures of the new world almost gone because they're worse cultures? No, it's because they were defenseless. Did Chrisitanity and Islam spread because they "worked?" No, they were spread by sword or settlement.

China's experiment isn't new, it's not even an experiment really. how do you think the Romanization of large parts of the old world happened, or the Russification of much of Eastern Europe? Is Finland 'idiotic' for defending its culture? Are they actually just living in a worse culture and haven't realised it yet?

What a terrible might makes right logic.

[pnako]

>Because the state stamped out every regional language during the creation of the Republic, and that was that.

They had signs on the walls in Breton schools telling that "it's forbidden to spit on the ground, or speak Breton".

[salmonfamine]

Yeah, good questions.

I'm not advocating an end to global platforms. And I don't think the democratic oversight should come from the US government. The end goal should be a website like Wikipedia -- non-profit, maintained and perhaps even funded by users.

In fact, I think a lot of the fragmentation of the internet you see abroad is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations. Maybe, if we are able to give users some degree of control over the design and policies of these platforms, we might be able to preserve the global internet. Some of that fragmentation -- as you see in the OP article -- is simply a result of governmental authoritarianism, which is a problem either way.

I think the first step would be to re-align some economic incentives by creating digital rights laws. GDPR is a good first step. So establishing something similar in the US. This itself is a hugely complicated step that could go very wrong, and due to the corrupt nature of US politics and the desire for large tech companies for regulatory capture, the potential pitfalls are many.

Then, if we manage to get that right, I think we need to find a way to create legislation that requires these platforms to give their users control regarding how content is presented to them -- essentially, the ability to control their feeds.

I don't know how we would manage to transition these companies to a true non-profit model. As long as they remain for-profit, they will fight and subvert these efforts every step of the way, even after they became law.

However, I think we are increasingly seeing how dangerous and unsustainable the current model is. Perhaps the best way to accelerate data rights is accelerationism -- making the exploits and faults in these platforms as visible as possible by "hacking" them.

[nickik]

> is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations

Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

> essentially, the ability to control their feeds

Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

> making the exploits and faults in these platforms as visible as possible by "hacking" them.

So hurting users even more in the process?

[vharuck]

>Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

It depends on the implementation. A good example for user control is Pandora. Not hard at all to control what music I'll hear.

[salmonfamine]

> Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Fair enough, that is also an issue.

> Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

I think we need to bring in concrete examples here. Consider GDPR -- would you characterize that as a governmental entity protecting its users?

> Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

I kind of doubt that. Facebook has introduced limited control over certain aspects of your feed and everyone I know has used those features. Even non-technical people I know routinely complain about suggested content, non-chronological feeds, and so on. These are popular (if not nearly-universal) concerns.

> So hurting users even more in the process?

Ok, I was off the mark there. I just mean that there are problems with the current platforms that expose real vulnerabilities into public discourse and democracy that have been exploited, and will be exploited much more thoroughly in the future. So doing nothing is not sustainable.

[closeparen]

>I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won't work

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.

[salmonfamine]

I am not. Thanks though.

[closeparen]

Then what kind of drastic action against for profit media are we talking about?

[austhrow743]

My reading is that they're calling for jackbooted thugs to go and shut down the advertising driven parts of the software industry.

[TimJRobinson]

> A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.

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

[nickik]

So what? You want to ban all websites with a comment section that are for profit? What about non-profits that make the founders rich by simply paying out a huge wage? Do you mean it should only be allowed to run on donations?

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.

[salmonfamine]

> So what? You want to ban all websites with a comment section that are for profit? What about non-profits that make the founders rich by simply paying out a huge wage? Do you mean it should only be allowed to run on donations?

No, I'm just pointing out that a for-profit structure necessarily clashes with the public value that these platforms produce. The only platform that escapes this conflict and functions quite well is Wikipedia. I don't think that's an accident.

> The things you say are easy to say, but hard to actually make in the real world without running into many more complications.

Yes, of course. My point is that we need to start thinking of solutions. If doing nothing had no consequences, I would be heavily in favor of doing nothing. But I believe it's clear that things are going quite wrong.

> 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?

I don't want anything to get banned. I don't want any government to unilaterally control the internet. I just want people from every country to have some democratic input into the massive tech platforms that heavily impact their daily lives. Perhaps international data rights legislation is the solution. I don't know. But we need to start taking these problems seriously and discussing real solutions -- not just creating federated Twitter clones that offer an unwieldy UX that the average user will never adopt.

[closeparen]

Democratic input and regulatory oversight over discourse is in the same category as total surveillance: a perfectly benevolent operator would certainly be able to produce a better world with it, but we cannot trust anyone with that kind of power.

[salmonfamine]

But we have before, at least in the US. It worked pretty well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

Just because there would be some democratic input doesn't mean there would be total democratic control. I think that's a pretty un-substantiated slippery slope.

[closeparen]

The allocation of RF spectrum is unavoidable. It can be done in either time domain or frequency domain; the FCC opts for both.

Similar issues appear for the internet with respect to backbone capacity and video streaming, but political speech mostly doesn't encounter the kinds of scarcity problems that justify such a heavy hand.

[rorykoehler]

Convert them into utilities

[snarf21]

You're not wrong but it is a little more complicated. We have lots of "news" organizations that also amplify the same nonsense and have the ability to undermine majorities. FOX News and CNN seem endlessly able to paint all issues as facts with polar opposite conclusions.

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.

[Jtsummers]

I think the bigger problems is that people seem to have developed an inherent trust of information they find on the internet, same as with what they hear on the radio or TV before (well, and still). Perhaps the trust is when the information agrees with their already present biases and preconceptions, but the trust is there. It's dangerous, and hard to overcome. And encouraging a general distrust doesn't help either, because there is good information out there.

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.

[luckylion]

> Perhaps the trust is when the information agrees with their already present biases and preconceptions, but the trust is there.

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.

[ecocentrik]

The loudest minorities have owned media outlets and been major political contributors. Dictators and plutocrats both have the same need to control the narrative and mute counter-narratives that challenge their authority.

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.

[umvi]

> This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted.

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).

[pjc50]

The statues are not arbitrary and many of them have been objected to for years.

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".

[umvi]

> The statues are not arbitrary and many of them have been objected to for years.

Christopher Columbus and Francis Scott Key aren't arbitrary? It's not like they were removed by a democratic process. The majority had no say. A loud minority decided they needed to come down for arbitrary reasons and did it without permission. Anyone challenging them would be browbeaten by the loud minority mobs on social media and cancelled (employers pressured to fire them, etc.). Loud minorities have effectively been making entire corporations cower and kowtow on social media during recent weeks.

[augustt]

Columbus has been a point of contention for a while now. Regardless, corporations are not saying BLM because some tiny segment of the country thinks that. A majority of America supports the movement, and that's being reflected by PR now.

The last line of defense for conservatives is "well actually there's a silent majority that thinks otherwise" and "actually most people don't care, they're just virtue signaling". And this works well when the Fox+ apparatus are the ones creating boogeymen out of minor things like CHAZ.

[umvi]

> Columbus has been a point of contention for a while now

That's a given, but it's arbitrary in that he's not generally recognized as a "symbol of slavery" like Confederate flags or statues are, so it's just minorities taking advantage of turmoil to bypass the democratic process and impose their will on everyone.

On a side note, I personally think it's wrong to retroactively "cancel" historical figures because we now judge their actions to modern morals. It's better to recognize they were victims of their time and not judge them as harshly - "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" and all.

Most of the founding fathers had slaves, but let's face it, most of us would have had slaves as well had we been born in their shoes. If we really decide it's a good idea to hold historical figures to modern standards, and cancel them if they fail the test, prepare for people in 2525 to retroactively cancel us and all of our heroes because we don't live up to the lofty (unknown) morals of 2525.

> Regardless, corporations are not saying BLM because some tiny segment of the country thinks that.

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about meaningless virtue signalling that corporations attempt to try to ingratiate the small, but extremely loud, mobs on social media (think GitHub changing master branch name). It's a corporation's worst PR nightmare to be harangued by the mob on social media.

[triceratops]

> he's not generally recognized as a "symbol of slavery"

He's not recognized as a symbol of plantation slavery because it didn't exist at the time. But he enslaved the native population of Hispaniola and was incredibly inhumane and cruel to them. So much so that the Spanish crown "canceled" him. Crazy, right?[1] He also never set foot on the US mainland. There aren't really any good reasons to have statues of the guy around.

> Most of the founding fathers had slaves

Is anyone taking down statues of Jefferson, Washington, Adams and co? You're drawing a false equivalence between them and Confederate leaders.

Confederate leaders engaged in high treason, and took up arms against their countrymen to defend their right to own other human beings. They deserve to be "canceled". There was already a public hearing about all of this 160 years ago. It was called the Civil War and they lost. The only reason these people weren't tried and executed for treason is because the Union saw fit to offer generous terms in order to end the conflict quicker and save lives (note how it never occurred to the Confederates that they too could save the lives of their own people, if only they gave up on their determination to own other human beings).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Accusatio...

[rorykoehler]

I think you're arguing in good faith however we should normalise destroying what are essentially idols. It needs to go way way deeper than pulling down a statue though. Right through the education system. In order to not cancel historical figures we can be more honest about them. Add the current events and their background to the curriculum and discuss why they happened, AFTER, you have taught the children the history through the lens of the white colonialist (as is currently done in school). That would be a far greater educational experience than anything on offer today anywhere.

[pjc50]

The confederate statues were erected many years after the war they had lost, specifically to promote white supremacy. Lee wasn't ""cancelled"", he surrendered, and was shown considerably more mercy than the 20th century showed to the surrendering Nazis.

Putting up a statue of Lee was whatever the opposite of virtue signalling is - vice signalling?

[syshum]

>>BLM because some tiny segment of the country thinks that. A majority of America supports the movement, and that's being reflected by PR now.

A majority of the nation supports the Statement "Black Lives matter" a Majority of the nation supports reforming the police and holding them accountable. And a majority of the nation supports ending systemic racism in our laws and institutions

BLM as movement / organization however has many many positions that are not supported by the majority, the organizers are self described Social Marxists, the BLM Foundation web site speaks of breaking down the nuclear family, and with in the movement is also an undertone of socialism even communism none of which is supported by the Majority of the nation

[stronglikedan]

> And a majority of the nation supports ending systemic racism in our laws and institutions

I'd wager that a majority of the nation knows there's no "systemic" racism in our laws and institutions, but does support ending the institutional problems that affect everyone who enters the justice system.

[127]

Yes, the majority of corporations supports virtue signalling at zero cost and making money.

[GaryNumanVevo]

Implying that these statues were put up were done so by a democratic process?

[rayiner]

> Christopher Columbus

I’ve been calling for the cancellation of Columbus since at least 2015. In part because he was a genocidal maniac. But mainly because it would give us an excuse to turn Columbus Circle in DC into a proper intersection.

[stronglikedan]

Grant is most certainly arbitrary.

[google234123]

Your statement that US police have been routinely murdering people for years is exaggerated.

[briefcomment]

Yes, those are better examples.

[willvarfar]

Perhaps Social Media has “democratized” lobbying?

Historically, only the vocal minorities with money could afford to influence politicians.

Now minorities without much money can get politicians attention too?

[briefcomment]

I think it's more that social media secretly gave lobbyists another avenue. In addition to paying decision makers directly, then can pay for a small army of loud people. Before social media, that small army might make up a protest in the street or something. With social media, that small army can seem much larger than it actually is.

[kunfuu]

I disagree with your factual statements as well as political theoretical statements.

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.

[Florin_Andrei]

> 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.

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.

[briefcomment]

I think a useful abstraction is that the internet has enabled an extremely potent form of _anti-social_ human interaction. When you have to talk to people face-to-face, there are a whole lot of checks and balances, both conscious and subconscious, that come into play and that tend to keep interactions reasonable.

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.

[netcan]

A lot of these issues, and similar ones, have been present all along. Pamphleteers basically started democracy. Media influence, gameability, loud minorities, media corruption, & infiltration by foreign provocateurs...

Media is a "pillar" of democracy. I think social media destabilized that pillar.

[oarabbus_]

>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.

Dewey Defeats Truman.

[analyte123]

Legacy media amplifies a loud minority too: owners, managers, and employees of media corporations. Most of the "controversy" around social media, stoked by legacy media, comes down to the old loud minority not liking that a different loud minority might get a say.

[adrr]

Do you think extreme fringe beliefs like QAnon would gain traction without social media?

Legacy media boundaries are dictated by advertisers.

[analyte123]

Scientology is considered a fringe belief group by many and managed to get hundreds of thousands of adherents long before social media. Just as an example that everyone always brings up, advertisers didn't stop the New York Times and many other allegedly credible sources from falsely claiming Iraq had WMDs, the result of which has killed approximately infinity times the number of people that QAnon has. Just like social media users, legacy media outlets distort the truth and stir up rancor in the populace ("hands up, don't shoot", president is a secret Russian agent, Obamacare is a government death panel, climate change isn't real: pick your poison).

[baybal2]

> 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.

A millennia old truth: take care of the politics, or politics will take care of you

[bmmayer1]

> social media undermines democracies as well

It's a good thing that power in democracies is determined by secret ballot and not likes on social media then!

[umvi]

Power in democracy and power in society are two different things. If someone is wielding un-democratic power in society, that power is undermining democratic power.

[chr1]

Instead of trying to silence the loud minority, a better solution would be to return a proportional voice to the silent majority. One way for that would be open voting where people vote not for political parties but directly for laws, and can trade votes between each other.

[rorykoehler]

Given what happened with Brexit I think this idea can only work with a highly educated populace living within a society underpinned by intellectually honest political discourse. We have neither at the moment.

[chr1]

With brexit people had only one opportunity to vote, so it was possible to mislead a large number of them, about unknown things happening in the future. With a system like this they could change their mind as the situation changes, so agitation would not have the same effect.

As the saying goes "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time", so this would in fact be a safeguard against things like Brexit.

[rorykoehler]

Gaslighting is endemic in politics.

[chr1]

Could you explain what do you mean? If you think that majority of people are not smart enough to have a say in how they should be governed, you need to propose some mechanism, of reducing their voice, because the mechanism which we use now, is saying that they have full vote, and ignoring their vote.

Or do you mean that the current system is gaslighting and direct democracy would be better?

[SllX]

It’s the new printing press. Gutenberg’s printing press also caused massive social upheaval and without it, it is unlikely we would have seen the accelerated pace of scientific progress, the Reformation spread as quickly as it did, the decline of Latin, just to name a few things. It’s often forgotten, but freedom of the press in the 1st Amendment refers to actual printing presses because you used to be able to be prosecuted for what came out of your printers.

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.

[8bitsrule]

>Loud minorities undermine majority rule.

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.

[vmception]

Department of Health and Human Services should put some social media sites inside a federal public health order, effectively banning them.

[dantillberg]

> This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted.

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)

[rorykoehler]

I predicted a Trump win. Actually I said that Trump would win against Hillary but lose to Bernie. I still believe that to be the case. Though I like many of Hillary's ideas (such as freedom of movement in the western hemisphere) Hillary had too much baggage to win. She doesn't have the charisma to shake the baggage. Added to that after the DNC debacle (also after my prediction) there was no transfer of support from Bernie to Hillary. This was the final nail in her campaign. The main surprise to me was how close it ended up being. In hindsight Trump is the inevitable result of decades of gas-lighting. It may also be the pivotal moment in US democratic history where the majority re-assumes responsibility for their government. An awakening of sorts.... if it doesn't get hijacked by subversive political operatives.

[boreas]

Also relevant to note that Trump wasn't supported by a majority, as OP seems to be implying. He won in the arbitrary schema of the electoral college.

[raffraffraff]

So how do we, um.. destroy them all?

[hyko]

But Turkey is not a democracy?

[netcan]

> Turkey is not a democracy?

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."

[m_a_g]

Turkey has been a democracy for almost a century now.

However, it all comes down to this, what happens when people of a democratic country elect a president that has totalitarian tendencies?

[rayiner]

This happens all the time, and the criticisms are, in my mind, directed at policy as much as anything about the people having “totalitarian tendencies.” In Muslim countries, in particular, like Turkey and Egypt, totalitarianism is usually invoked to keep out proponents of political Islam. Erdogan was replacing authoritarians who maintained Turkey’s secular regime against a religious populace. When Egypt’s dictator fell, the people replaced him with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then a military dictator toppled him to restore secularism.

[SecurityMinded]

On the paper, Turkiye is a democracy. In reality, since 1950's it was not. It is a dictatorship or oligarchy at best, funded by the big money of the world, mostly from the US. Rigged elections, placing puppet governments (like Tayyip) is an ongoing theme. At the time of election, people are given the impression of who they are electing as it is in a democracy, while the result is already known by the powers that be. Other than few military takeovers of the country since 1960, this country have never had fair and clear elections. Hence, Tayyip's puppet government has ben brought to action by the same powers that be, to decimate the Turkish armed forces, so, no more of those nasty military take-over actions can be repeated. Turkiye has turned into a Banana republic for what it is worth.

[ChuckNorris89]

If Turkey is a puppet, who's holding the strings?

[zentiggr]

What does their export market and foreign currency reserves tell you? (I don't know myself, just suggesting the points of leverage.)

[nurettin]

FX reserves tell us whatever every country's FX tell us. That countries have forex, gold and bond reserves to protect the value of their currency. It can also work in the opposite direction. India and US keep large sums of gold. Greece kept large sums of US govt. bonds (until 2008 market crash at which point they found out this was a bad idea).

Japan's Abe is famous for auctioning huge reserves of JPY in order to reduce the value of their currency and stock up on USD. Reduced currency value means their exports became temporarily cheaper and this way they got an artificial boost to their production industry.

This is a complex subject and doesn't show that "country X is the puppet of country Y", it rather shows how they like to strategize for their own benefit.

[brnt]

https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2020

[hansjorg]

Their opinions on Turkey might be fair, but beware that Freedom House is basically an arm of the US State Department.

[ashtonkem]

If you’re not going to contest their conclusions, what was the point of bringing that up?

[SahAssar]

Acknowledging bias is worthwhile even if the conclusion might be the same.

[ashtonkem]

It’s also a good way to cast doubt on something indirectly, without having to explicitly enumerate any factual disagreements.

[hyko]

See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

[pnako]

"Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off" -- Erdogan

[briefcomment]

Edited for clarification.