81–90 of 224 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2020
Their opinions on Turkey might be fair, but beware that Freedom House is basically an arm of the US State Department.
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…
Media is a "pillar" of democracy. I think social media destabilized that pillar.
There is a reason why we're seeing the rise of the autocrats (Erdogan, Putin, Jiping, Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, Duterte, Kaczyński, ...): it is because openness and democracy triumphed before. And it won because previous autocrats failed. Edit: my point is: starting in the late 70's, authoritarian regimes failed miserably before all over the world, therefore there's no reason to believe they'll succeed thist time. Rem…
> it is because openness and democracy triumphed before How do you think openness and democracy triumphing cause the rise of autocrats? Are you referring to Plato's five regimes theory, where each type of government degenerates into a different government, in a cycle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freedom of speech is specifically freedom from the government interfering with your speech. Freedom of speech does not mean you can compel others into carrying your message forward. Take your argument to its logical conclusion. Say I want everyone you come in contact with to hear my personal thoughts on government. Are you ok with being compelled to pass along a card with my diatribe on it to all of the people you in…
> Freedom of speech is specifically freedom from the government interfering with your speech Yes, it is an important point but somewhat old. Nowadays it can be generalized: freedom of speech is a protection of the stage from monopolization by anyone (being it a government, company or private person). I would say, now it is more important and much more difficult to protect the communication channels from giant compani…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the sixth or seventh incident within the past 10 years. Every time economy goes to the gutter, they make a speech about how "outside forces are trying to bring us down" or "the world is envious" or "we will shut down twitter". Two weeks later, everything goes back to normal. So far, wikipedia took the longest to recover because everyone was too scared to take action without asking the president and he was pro…
> "Every time economy goes to the gutter, they make a speech about how "outside forces are trying to bring us down" Thank you for discovering universal rule. If you read US/Canadian press for example you might find out that for any bad thing happening inside some evil foreign entities are responsible. Any government needs an enemy to take people's eye from their own f..k ups.
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…
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.
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…
Historically, only the vocal minorities with money could afford to influence politicians.
Now minorities without much money can get politicians attention too?
The United States is not much better in terms of this. We have a free press in name only. If you are saying something that certain people don’t like, you are canceled. Your tweets will be taken down since you violated weakly worded community standards. You will be flagged on HN. Etc. Ultimately we have a dictatorship of ideas. The best answer so far is to go make a freedom platform with blackjack and hookers. Essenti…
>Ultimately we have a dictatorship of ideas What an amazing way to phrase "others don't like what I am saying and don't want to associate with me". The government controlling social media platforms is vastly different from a collection of companies controlling social media platforms that they built. There's an argument that can be made about companies needing to treat their platforms as public squares depending on if…
https://old.reddit.com/r/kotakuinaction2/comments/hi47ci/dic...
Every time I see news like this I can't help but wonder what would happen if federated social media becomes mainstream. All these attempts to regulate social media generally revolve around there being a "platform", it being a company, it caring about profits, it having a legal department etc. It all falls apart spectacularly if you frame social media as something intertwined with the internet itself, with no central…
Solve for the equilibrium. We would expect federated social media to increase in popularity when the convenience of centralized social media is jeopardized. I believe in Russia, where people don't feel safe voicing their opinions publicly on centralized social media, ad hoc social networks have appeared on safe chat platforms like Telegram to take their place.
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…
> 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).
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".