191–200 of 224 posts
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- Anything positive about China - Relating ad blocking to piracy - Benefits of open offices
These may be controversial but you won’t be canceled.
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 wh…
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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 peopl…
> 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 cultur…
They had signs on the walls in Breton schools telling that "it's forbidden to spit on the ground, or speak Breton".
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 wh…
But Turkey is not a democracy?
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.
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> 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.
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.
True, but the press relied on an advertising-based business model right from the start. That, in hindsight, was not such a sensible choice.
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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.
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.
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 wh…
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.
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These may be controversial but you won’t be canceled.
they were downvoted. downvoting costs reputation and can lead to a dead post. downvoting means, “don't argue this position again”. fair to say they were cancelled i think.
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 wh…
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 fa…
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.