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- Hacker News
- Even Traditional media hurts Democracy.
Social media gave a voice to people.
Sure, not everyone has a point worth paying attention to, nor are most participants on social media real - most likely bots.
But do we want only points of views from Billionaire network and media owners who have their own agenda ?
People should pay more attention to what affects their daily lives and not what hatred is shown to them to rile them up.
If the individuals in the society are discerning and capable then no media traditional or social can have power to manipulate us against each other.
by wtfHN26 - These arguments nearly always boil down to "stupid people are harming democracy". From which the natural consequence is "stupid people should not be allowed to vote". However, the people making the arguments are generally don't want to say that because it contradicts their ideology or it just plain looks bad, so they resort to an alternative argument: "stupid people should be allowed to vote but the information that they have access to should be controlled by us instead of by the Bad People".by hax0ron3
- It is the entrenched media and the politicians amplifying this because the narrative is no longer in their control.by foolinaround
- 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.
by stickfigure - 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.by dghughes
- At some point we’ll need to talk about reality TV, which normalised a lot of human stupidity and character flaws. And the color orange.by rbanffy
- I think one of the biggest ways social media can harm democracy is that it’s trivially easy for a foreign actor (or anyone with malicious intent) to run an influence campaign now. How would they have done it before social media - printed out millions of leaflets? That would be very obvious, expensive, logistically difficult, and hard to scale.
It was very telling when X started showing people’s locations and a lot of the political accounts targeting the US were based in other countries.
by dabinat - 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.
by ramity