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Comments (92)

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  ramity
  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.
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  CM30
  I feel like the design of many social media platforms is having a bigger effect than the concept itself. Like on a certain level, social media existing has had a lot of benefits. Every hobbyist community I'm part of is going through a golden age due to the ease of communication between people in said hobby, and how quickly discoveries are getting out there.The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction. Recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll, provocative posts being rewarded overall, length restrictions that kill nuance, echo chambers created by said recommendation algorithms and the ability for any rando to register as many accounts as they want are what's damaging democracy and people's mental health.Unfortunately, many of those features are also exactly how they're so good at distributing information for people with an interest in any particular niche or sub field. The same algorithms that trap us in echo chambers are also the same ones surfacing awesome new frameworks and programming techniques, tricks for video game speedruns, artwork of whatever you're interested in seeing more of and crazy mods that put N64 games on the SNES.The challenge is that we really want to surface the best creative works and finds and information about our interests, while not getting caught in a negativity spiral or trapped in a fake news filled echo chamber.
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  dabinat
  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.
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  stickfigure
  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.
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  hax0ron3
  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".
• rbanffy
  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.
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  dghughes
  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.
• Armecera
  I think the problem is, negative opinion stand out so much that they look like a lots, even when there are nnot that many.
• foolinaround
  It is the entrenched media and the politicians amplifying this because the narrative is no longer in their control.
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  laweijfmvo
  Spoiler it’s not social media anymore, it’s just media.
• wtfHN26
  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.
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  NalNezumi
  I think people that are trying to argue the "fake news have always existed" is missing the point at best (or wishful ignorance as a tech worker benefiting on outsourcing blame to others, and comfortably giving themselves at the next EA donation meetup).The history of media have always had an disruption and people taking advantage of it: printing machine was a disruption that caused people like Martin Luther to be able to reach to prominence (printing press was initially printing more short news/tabloid letter, wayy more than books or proper news. And it was majority fake news). Another disruption was the radio. Made people with good, passionate voice being able to take advantage of it (Hitler, that US crazy pastor I can't remember the name of). It's up to your own moral compass if those disruption was good or bad, but they all followed by regulators realizing the potential danger of it, and putting guardrails.But that's not the point. The point is scale. You have finite bandwidth to process information and unlike some queue system on a computer that will just lag or overflow, as a human you'll start to behave differently and it affects your information processing capacity. Doubly so if that queue is artificially filled (biased) with certain information (attention grabbing, outrage seeking algorithms)People saying "fake news always existed" is saying "quantity doesn't matter". They're essentially saying: "school math test have always had 10+ multiplication table memorization questions. Why are people whining that they have to do 1e6 questions on one sitting??" which is ironic because techies are the first to say SCALE SCALE SCALE SCALE as an crucial strength and differentiator of software.Appeal to history is the favorite Fallacy of techies (at least on HN) fueled by some American libertarian delusion of thinking social dynamics can be ignored.It's pretty clear to me that those kind of techies clearly can't even conceive the problem, so don't be surprised that people are shifting to regulators to tackle this
• Kalanos
  Inform but also misinform
• nephihaha
  There are two ways to look it this. Either the growth of extremism, or the death of machine politics. Both are happening.
• caaqil
  The term democracy doesn't strictly apply to most countries in the article. It's doubtful that social media has any effect on democracy or election outcomes, negative or otherwise. In fact, there's evidence (e.g., The Golden Rule) to suggest that even voters have little to no effect on what policy governs their lives in these countries.
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  nacozarina
  Is it ‘harming democracy’, or merely exposing a system of theatrics & ceremony intended to masquerade as a ‘democracy’? I’m less convinced our democracy was ‘lost’ than I am its absence was long-obscured by clever elites.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0
  The cynicism in these comments is proving their point.
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  j45
  When people don't learn to use tech, it's used against them by those seeking fun, power and profit.
• cringleycringe
  Absolutely, even here it’s all infiltrated by china
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  aeternum
  Fake news has been harming democracy since democracy was invented. Remember those indian scalpings? Mostly made up by Benjamin Franklin to rally support for colonial gov.If anything social media is a benefit to democracy vs. legacy media because it dilutes the power of any one voice, it's very hard to control all social media whereas a couple conglomerates now own nearly all of legacy media.Looked at another way, if democracy cannot withstand social media and made up stories then it's not a stable system of government. Stories of the end of history are greatly exaggerated, historically democracy is far less successful than autocracy, perhaps due to this issue.
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  slibhb
  If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy.The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.