[Avicebron]

> 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.

[em-bee]

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.

[iamnothere]

These people believe (as did the ineffectual idiots who ran the Weimar Republic, and the later idiots who destroyed the USSR) that control of information and the social narrative will prevent the population from rebelling in the face of economic decline. They are dead wrong, and they are only making things worse by distorting the feedback loop that could correct bad policy.