Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting perspective, however I do not believe that the Internet is democratising. I regard democracy (and capitalism) as being an industrial-era approximation of solutions to the institution-alignment-problem (analogous to the AI alignment problem, but for governments and corporations). Both of these have their own failure modes; In the case of democracy, the failure mode is that people do not know objective t…
None of these effects is new. One could print anything on pamphlets, or shout it in the town square before literacy was widespread. When searching for that boots quote to put here, I found this reference with excellent 18th century quotes about the issue: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ There's the possibility that the internet has made it worse, but that's a theory I've yet to see evidence for. You c…
> Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levilling spirit.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_531.asp
Outright propaganda, foreign 'interference', and yellow journalism were extremely common in the era that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were created! The media of the day was substantially less centralized, even a medium-sized town had multiple newspapers, and political pamphlets of all natures were common.
Complaints that the people are voting 'wrong' because they're misinformed by 'designing men' are absolutely nothing new and date back to our earliest democracies. Really, the only interesting part is that the complainants are almost always defending entrenched, powerful interests. In American history, it has always been populist and/or socialist movements decried as the result of a woefully misinformed populace, and it was always analogous movements in e.g., Athens and Rome (the Gracchi, for example.) Propaganda supporting the entrenched rich and powerful and their policies is, somehow, never seen as an issue.
Going back again to the early years of America, the hysteria about 'propaganda' led to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were used to suppress the Democratic-Republicans and their press outlets...which ended with the Federalists being crushed in the 1800 election. When I hear complaints about propaganda in democracies, what I hear is the complaints of the rich and powerful that the common people might be voting in their own interest, instead of those of the rich and powerful.