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 think we want algorithmic feeds, we just want humane ones instead of adversarial ones. Give me a feed that prioritizes close friends and family first, important milestones over trivialities, impactful news over ragebait. Give me a highly curated version of Reddit with HN quality moderation. Most people would be very happy with that, but it runs counter to the advertising incentives and engagement metrics which drive the industry.
You and I would be very happy with that, but you and I are not most people.
Most people like the addictive garbage, and they reward the systems that feed it to them. That’s why every surviving platform has gone that way, and why any new attempt to do better always fails.
As with all things, the root of the issue is the incentive structure. Once again, we see the incentive of limitless growth and capital accumulation at all costs turns out to be harmful, actually. Waow.
> see the incentive of limitless growth and capital accumulation at all costs turns out to be harmful, actually
One of the most harmful effects of the accumulation of capital is the accumulation of political power that accompanies it. We need aggressively limit the power that can be gained that way.
I would say that the ability for plausible-looking online personas to infiltrate and influence people's thought processes is the root of what plagues use, and a chronological feed wouldn't fix that!
I take it further. I believe that WW3 has started before we even realised where the battlefield might be. Unfettered, anonymous, practically instant access to interfere with almost every earthly inhabitant's life and thoughts is a scenario beyond the wildest dreams of any despot until recently.
Optimising for engagement, centralised controls, pervasive data collection and mining, and addictive design need to go as well. Might be easier to ban the entire thing and let us get back to blogs.
Yeah, I agree: social media is great. Commoditized, commercialized social media, not so great.
Never forget, folks: we can all go back to mailman and phpBB, or the modern equivalent, at any point in time. Many of us do! There are still wonderful subject-driven forums out there, not quite inundated by the dreaded "&fbid disease"...
Mailing lists were never "fine". Discoverability is terrible. People change email addresses all the time. Subscription management remains an unsolved problem. Inboxes fill up. Legitimate messages are falsely flagged as spam.
Perhaps there are real problems with algorithmic feeds. But going back to mailing lists is simply impractical and never going to happen.
People claim they want chronological feeds but hardly anyone actually does. With a chronological algorithm that incentivizes users to post slop more often to get noticed. In reality most social media users want priority given to major life events. Like if I haven't logged in to Facebook in a few days I'd prefer to see the announcement that my second cousin in Italy just had a baby prioritized at the top of the feed, ahead of the picture of what my neighbor cooked for lunch.
I think what we want are relatively dumb algorithms, ideally open source and tweakable by the user (e.g. select chronological or prioritised).
I suppose you could build a scraper to do it but a platform like Facebook take steps to make it difficult. Maybe we're almost at the stage where a personalised AI assistant could parse your feed on the fly and reconstruct it into something user-friendly (a much smarter algorithm to build a dumber one!)
I'd like to have the old social media back, but then again it depends if anyone is still posting content.
You know you can talk to your relatives, right? If Facebook is your only source for whether your second cousin had a baby, maybe they’re not that important in your life. Which is fine - not everyone can be. But I think Facebook is a way of keeping up with people that you’re barely friends with, and maybe that’s not necessary.
I didn't come here for snarky, low-effort comments from random HN users about how to conduct my family relationships. Facebook isn't "necessary" but it sure makes my life better in many ways.
Have you read any of them? (Many are digitized.) That is longform text more akin to the early-millennium blogosphere than modern social media. Moreover, the USA's early pamphlets were at a time of lower literacy rates and limited print runs, and reading one could involve real social interactions, not like screen-mediated ones, because one might also be reading out loud for one's fellows.
Martin Luther's 16th-century triumph was not in nailing his theses to the door, but having Gutenberg to distribute the pamphlets produced by him and his colleagues, far and wide, outstripping any measures to control or rein them in.
I really think it's intentional. I've seen a number of people explain, self-reflectively and in detail, that mainstream media outlets are bad because they don't spend enough time covering various outrages and taking heated positions on issues.
To be honest, I think this is looking for an easy villain to blame to avoid asking the hard questions about social media. I remember when 10-15 years ago everyone was sure the problem was pseudonymity; they said "make people attach their real names to their comments and Greater Internet Fuckwad Syndrome will go away". We mostly lost pseudonymity--Facebook forces real names and a bunch of people on Xitter use them even though they don't need to--and it didn't help one bit: turns out people are perfectly happy to be toxic under their real identity.
"Get rid of algorithmic feeds" strikes me as similarly wishful thinking.
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.
>The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction.
I agree, but it's not something exclusive to social platforms. Traditional media do this too, albeit in slightly different technical form. Today there are just too much information offered for consumption, so almost everyone who exploits our attention is incentivized to be manipulative.
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.
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.
You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?
I think a lot of the issue is that in local communities a lot of what would have been direct local discussion has moved on-line, and is manipulated for "engagement".
> You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?
No, not really. I grew up in the TV era. Whatever algorithmic tricks FB is playing, they're nothing compared to broadcast news.
I also don't think the algorithmic tricks are particularly insidious. Mostly they give people more of what they ask for. Yeah, this allows QAnoners to build themselves a little echo chamber. But this is nothing new; walk into your local Kingdom Hall and see if they want to be friends with an infidel.
If you want to fix this, stop unfriending people who don't think like you. Challenge the echo chambers.
The algorithmic tricks give people more of what they engage with, which is not really the same thing as giving them what they ask for. The problem is that this puts "this is neat, I like this" on an equal footing with "WHAT THE !@#$!@#$ IS THIS?!"
If I scroll through Facebook or X/Twitter, it's miles of ragebait. There's good stuff in there too, but why the hell is it showing me posts from Angry Conservative Mom and Being Liberal and other stuff like that? I don't want to see it, but either I engage before I can stop myself, or they at least think I will. Or I manage the willpower to stay off those platforms. Lots of people don't, and end up scrolling through an infinite stream of content designed and targeted to enrage them.
They're just propaganda firehoses. TV was too, but at least it had to be propaganda with extremely broad appeal. They couldn't select the propaganda best suited to getting engagement from you, personally, and then send it directly to you.
> If I scroll through Facebook or X/Twitter, it's miles of ragebait. There's good stuff in there too, but why the hell is it showing me posts from Angry Conservative Mom and Being Liberal and other stuff like that? I don't want to see it, but either I engage before I can stop myself, or they at least think I will.
You see it because you don't take the time to curate the content that it feeds you.
I don't use Facebook anymore because what I primarily used it for is better served by WhatsApp groups, but even so it is still incredibly easy to curate your feed and get rid of content you don't want to see.
The same is true of YouTube, X/Twitter and pretty much every other social media site.
E.g. on Facebook you click the ... next to the post in question and you can either choose 'hide' (typically if it's ad) to never see it again or 'not interested'.
In YouTube you do the same by clicking on the 3-dots and saying you're not interested in the content, or you subscribe to the channels you want to see and instead of having youtube.com as your bookmark/homepage you have youtube.com/feed/subscriptions as your bookmark.
It takes a smidge of work and it's not a 'one and done' process because they still recommend random new things all the time based on the things you engage with/the things they promote for whatever demographic subset(s) they've pinned you as but once you've got your feeds curated they become much fewer and farther between.
And honestly...sometimes the algorithm does surface something i'm interested in.
Finally just a word of warning with curation - you have to try find a balance if you want to avoid your entire online world becoming an echo chamber. In my eyes the curation isn't about trying to get rid of opinions you 'disagree' with, it's about trying to get rid of low quality content that serves the most reactionary/click-baity of content
yea, i agree. the internet has provided the freest form of communication ever. im very suspicious of those who invoke "democracy" in an attempt to control it.
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".
I knew as usual on HN the most logical and accurate comment would be at the problem and greyed out.
If the people are too stupid to navigate democracy while reading, seeing and hearing what other people say online, even malicious actors/disinformation etc then they shouldn't be allowed to vote.
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.
Yes BUT nobody took anything on any of those platforms seriously. It was commonly agreed on at the time that the internet was for bullshit and bullshitting, and people reacted accordingly. The problems online didn't start in earnest until a bunch of people were convinced to pretend, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that online spaces were a real thing where Important Stuff happened.
Sure, but it's become a major issue with social media too because of the ease and ability to amplify things that aren't even something major or regional media would cover and profitable media still has some incentive to not be completely inaccurate because of liability. Now you can have the dumbest people with no concern for liability, because they own nothing and don't really have any source of income, making factually inaccurate AI assisted posts, videos, images, etc that inflame the general public who do no verification or fact checking.
Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.
Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.
Yeah, we have never had what the Greeks would consider a true 'demos' in the U.S. (besides maybe at our founding) so democracy might not be a good word for our system. Its more-like enslavement through the tyranny of the majority.
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
People saying "fake news always existed" are trying to explain that the quantity of it is not so different as many modern commentaries seem to think. 25 years ago, the kind people Tweeting about how protests are satanic weren't stewing in impotence, they were writing church leaflets about how Pokemon and the New World Order were satanic.
It's not wrong to say "fake news always existed" -- it radicalized Heinlein into becoming a hard-right conservative in the 40's, for example. It's been around since the beginning of the republic.
It is completely wrong to say or imply that quantity of it hasn't changed with social media. All of the Satanic panic church leaflets you speak of -- in aggregate -- had infinitesimally small reach compared to a single Facebook post.
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.
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.
20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.
What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.
and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.
No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.
20 years ago, the President was running a war that was justified by shady supposed intelligence about the enemy having weapons of mass destruction, and was authorizing foreign prisoners to be sent to be tortured in secret sites in Eastern Europe.
50 years ago, the President was supporting numerous brutal authoritarian third-world regimes that routinely used torture and murder. That still happens, but it happened more during the Cold War.
US foreign policy is actually a lot more moral now than it was during the Cold War. I think this probably has more to do with how much harder it is to hide things from the masses than it does with a change of heart, but the fact remains.
> 20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
The public learning technology removes their agency from themselves to be competent in literate in the use of those technologies for themselves, and to recognize it being used against them.
This is what I meant. Is that what you are saying removes agency from the individual?
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.
The stability of autocracy is greatly exaggerated. It often can't even withstand the leader dying. Government stability is the great feature of democracy. I'm not quite as confident as I used to be, but I'm still pretty confident that my country will have a new leader in 2029 and that there will not be a violent civil war accompanying the transition.
a hallmark of fascism and dictatorships is the capture of media, and the censorship of it.
i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.
Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.
Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.
You just need to go one step further. The fear of billionaires buying media is used to justify increased government control of media and ultimately leads to a ministry of truth.
Once the ministry of truth gains power, democracy is finished.
The extremely unpopular citizen's united supreme court case was in many ways a last ditch attempt to prevent the creation of the ministry of truth. It likely won't last.
In the US, social media has been captured by propaganda not because an authoritarian government has made it so through law and violence, but because the consumers like the propaganda.
The current situation is the result of free speech and consumers being able to choose the kind of content that they enjoy.
It is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that your argument in effect logically implies that free speech should be further curtailed and that elites (but the Right Elites) should be in control of the sources of content.
Which is a defensible position to take, actually. But people generally don't take it because reduction in free speech and consumer choice is anti-democratic. So the essence of this position is actually that we have too much democracy, not too little.
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.
As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
> As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
Yeah, I don't like how people choose to communicate on the internet either. But that doesn't make it "not free speech."
In case my point was missed, I was doubting the "people" element of the communication, not the "free speech" (although my opinions on that have also changed since my idealistic early internet days).
> If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy
That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.
But people aren't communicating freely. They are being throttled, shadow banned, refused etc. In some cases these are political candidates. Since this is one of the main channels of consumption these obvious and well documented manipulations are having a massive impact on political outcomes.
"Free communication" is specifically held up as a threat to democracy by current leaders in quite a few states. For instance, Macron and Merz in France and Germany have both recently explictly comdemned free communication, that isn't filtered and gatekept by some "common framework" or government agency, as a threat to democracy. Probably because this communication is producing social movements in these countries that the state cannot control.
And if this isn't US-centric enough for you, the previous US administration created a "Disinformation Governance Board" specifically to address the threats that they felt free communication among the people was posing to democracy, taking action to pressure corporate actors to censor disfavored popular speech in attempt to circumvent first amendment protections. At least the current administration isn't really pretending that attacking free speech is protecting democracy somehow.
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.
Yes, recommendation systems are (most of) the root.
But chronological feeds don't solve it (plenty of research on this).
Recommender systems that don't optimize for division are a more meaningful solution, ala https://bridging.systems/ (lots of work by others too).
This, e.g., bridging-based ranking, is same approach that underlies Community Notes.
Ideally they should optimise against division. I’m not sold on community notes, as they are quite flawed as well and easily manipulated.
I think we want algorithmic feeds, we just want humane ones instead of adversarial ones. Give me a feed that prioritizes close friends and family first, important milestones over trivialities, impactful news over ragebait. Give me a highly curated version of Reddit with HN quality moderation. Most people would be very happy with that, but it runs counter to the advertising incentives and engagement metrics which drive the industry.
You and I would be very happy with that, but you and I are not most people.
Most people like the addictive garbage, and they reward the systems that feed it to them. That’s why every surviving platform has gone that way, and why any new attempt to do better always fails.
It’s ugly but it’s true.
As with all things, the root of the issue is the incentive structure. Once again, we see the incentive of limitless growth and capital accumulation at all costs turns out to be harmful, actually. Waow.
> see the incentive of limitless growth and capital accumulation at all costs turns out to be harmful, actually
One of the most harmful effects of the accumulation of capital is the accumulation of political power that accompanies it. We need aggressively limit the power that can be gained that way.
I would say that the ability for plausible-looking online personas to infiltrate and influence people's thought processes is the root of what plagues use, and a chronological feed wouldn't fix that!
Opposing viewpoints I can live with but I think it's used to feed people a warped reality which they respond to in predictable and useful ways.
I take it further. I believe that WW3 has started before we even realised where the battlefield might be. Unfettered, anonymous, practically instant access to interfere with almost every earthly inhabitant's life and thoughts is a scenario beyond the wildest dreams of any despot until recently.
Optimising for engagement, centralised controls, pervasive data collection and mining, and addictive design need to go as well. Might be easier to ban the entire thing and let us get back to blogs.
How would you ban social media? It would be like trying to ban LLMs.
Yeah, I agree: social media is great. Commoditized, commercialized social media, not so great.
Never forget, folks: we can all go back to mailman and phpBB, or the modern equivalent, at any point in time. Many of us do! There are still wonderful subject-driven forums out there, not quite inundated by the dreaded "&fbid disease"...
Mailing lists were and are fine. The algorithmic feed took over because it’s more addictive, simple as.
Mailing lists were never "fine". Discoverability is terrible. People change email addresses all the time. Subscription management remains an unsolved problem. Inboxes fill up. Legitimate messages are falsely flagged as spam.
Perhaps there are real problems with algorithmic feeds. But going back to mailing lists is simply impractical and never going to happen.
The medium causes the type of message.
The feed is root of the problem.
The feed is an integral part of social media.
We’re allowing them—companies, states, whoever—to feed us individually-targeted generated propaganda.
People claim they want chronological feeds but hardly anyone actually does. With a chronological algorithm that incentivizes users to post slop more often to get noticed. In reality most social media users want priority given to major life events. Like if I haven't logged in to Facebook in a few days I'd prefer to see the announcement that my second cousin in Italy just had a baby prioritized at the top of the feed, ahead of the picture of what my neighbor cooked for lunch.
I think what we want are relatively dumb algorithms, ideally open source and tweakable by the user (e.g. select chronological or prioritised).
I suppose you could build a scraper to do it but a platform like Facebook take steps to make it difficult. Maybe we're almost at the stage where a personalised AI assistant could parse your feed on the fly and reconstruct it into something user-friendly (a much smarter algorithm to build a dumber one!)
I'd like to have the old social media back, but then again it depends if anyone is still posting content.
You know you can talk to your relatives, right? If Facebook is your only source for whether your second cousin had a baby, maybe they’re not that important in your life. Which is fine - not everyone can be. But I think Facebook is a way of keeping up with people that you’re barely friends with, and maybe that’s not necessary.
I didn't come here for snarky, low-effort comments from random HN users about how to conduct my family relationships. Facebook isn't "necessary" but it sure makes my life better in many ways.
I agree the world was better with chronological feeds.
But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.
So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.
When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.
Didn't the US have a very vibrant culture of highly partisan outrage papers and pamphlets in the 19th century?
Have you read any of them? (Many are digitized.) That is longform text more akin to the early-millennium blogosphere than modern social media. Moreover, the USA's early pamphlets were at a time of lower literacy rates and limited print runs, and reading one could involve real social interactions, not like screen-mediated ones, because one might also be reading out loud for one's fellows.
Martin Luther's 16th-century triumph was not in nailing his theses to the door, but having Gutenberg to distribute the pamphlets produced by him and his colleagues, far and wide, outstripping any measures to control or rein them in.
"prefer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
it is intentional, or is it engineered?
Worse, data-driven. They researched what fat people preferred and concluded they prefer fat.
I really think it's intentional. I've seen a number of people explain, self-reflectively and in detail, that mainstream media outlets are bad because they don't spend enough time covering various outrages and taking heated positions on issues.
Consider that those people might be right. A lot of mainstream media outlets have been sanewashing a lot of insane behavior for a few years now.
Agreed, the state of social media today is basically a result of market failure.
The market seems to be doing what it does best just fine, actually.
To be honest, I think this is looking for an easy villain to blame to avoid asking the hard questions about social media. I remember when 10-15 years ago everyone was sure the problem was pseudonymity; they said "make people attach their real names to their comments and Greater Internet Fuckwad Syndrome will go away". We mostly lost pseudonymity--Facebook forces real names and a bunch of people on Xitter use them even though they don't need to--and it didn't help one bit: turns out people are perfectly happy to be toxic under their real identity.
"Get rid of algorithmic feeds" strikes me as similarly wishful thinking.
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.
>The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction.
I agree, but it's not something exclusive to social platforms. Traditional media do this too, albeit in slightly different technical form. Today there are just too much information offered for consumption, so almost everyone who exploits our attention is incentivized to be manipulative.
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.
> printed out millions of leaflets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_New_Zealand_election_fund...
Perhaps funded by USA fundies. A million dollars is a lot of influence in New Zealand elections.
> 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.
One thing to consider is if there were no social media would these attempts to subvert democracy stop ?
There are always elements in news media, academia, industry etc who are pawns in hands of foreign powers with ulterior motives.
Russia certainly couldn't afford to disrupt all the elections they do without it. Traditional spycraft is highly skilled and expensive.
It’s a matter of difficulty. Social media makes it ridiculously easy.
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.
You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?
I think a lot of the issue is that in local communities a lot of what would have been direct local discussion has moved on-line, and is manipulated for "engagement".
> You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?
No, not really. I grew up in the TV era. Whatever algorithmic tricks FB is playing, they're nothing compared to broadcast news.
I also don't think the algorithmic tricks are particularly insidious. Mostly they give people more of what they ask for. Yeah, this allows QAnoners to build themselves a little echo chamber. But this is nothing new; walk into your local Kingdom Hall and see if they want to be friends with an infidel.
If you want to fix this, stop unfriending people who don't think like you. Challenge the echo chambers.
It's not about the algorithm, it's about what you can or can't say. Facebook censors you and won't allow you to say certain things.
The algorithmic tricks give people more of what they engage with, which is not really the same thing as giving them what they ask for. The problem is that this puts "this is neat, I like this" on an equal footing with "WHAT THE !@#$!@#$ IS THIS?!"
If I scroll through Facebook or X/Twitter, it's miles of ragebait. There's good stuff in there too, but why the hell is it showing me posts from Angry Conservative Mom and Being Liberal and other stuff like that? I don't want to see it, but either I engage before I can stop myself, or they at least think I will. Or I manage the willpower to stay off those platforms. Lots of people don't, and end up scrolling through an infinite stream of content designed and targeted to enrage them.
They're just propaganda firehoses. TV was too, but at least it had to be propaganda with extremely broad appeal. They couldn't select the propaganda best suited to getting engagement from you, personally, and then send it directly to you.
> If I scroll through Facebook or X/Twitter, it's miles of ragebait. There's good stuff in there too, but why the hell is it showing me posts from Angry Conservative Mom and Being Liberal and other stuff like that? I don't want to see it, but either I engage before I can stop myself, or they at least think I will.
You see it because you don't take the time to curate the content that it feeds you.
I don't use Facebook anymore because what I primarily used it for is better served by WhatsApp groups, but even so it is still incredibly easy to curate your feed and get rid of content you don't want to see.
The same is true of YouTube, X/Twitter and pretty much every other social media site.
E.g. on Facebook you click the ... next to the post in question and you can either choose 'hide' (typically if it's ad) to never see it again or 'not interested'.
In YouTube you do the same by clicking on the 3-dots and saying you're not interested in the content, or you subscribe to the channels you want to see and instead of having youtube.com as your bookmark/homepage you have youtube.com/feed/subscriptions as your bookmark.
It takes a smidge of work and it's not a 'one and done' process because they still recommend random new things all the time based on the things you engage with/the things they promote for whatever demographic subset(s) they've pinned you as but once you've got your feeds curated they become much fewer and farther between.
And honestly...sometimes the algorithm does surface something i'm interested in.
Finally just a word of warning with curation - you have to try find a balance if you want to avoid your entire online world becoming an echo chamber. In my eyes the curation isn't about trying to get rid of opinions you 'disagree' with, it's about trying to get rid of low quality content that serves the most reactionary/click-baity of content
Where do you find social media that is like that? The big social media places are full of gate keepers.
yea, i agree. the internet has provided the freest form of communication ever. im very suspicious of those who invoke "democracy" in an attempt to control it.
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.
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".
I knew as usual on HN the most logical and accurate comment would be at the problem and greyed out.
If the people are too stupid to navigate democracy while reading, seeing and hearing what other people say online, even malicious actors/disinformation etc then they shouldn't be allowed to vote.
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.
Yes BUT nobody took anything on any of those platforms seriously. It was commonly agreed on at the time that the internet was for bullshit and bullshitting, and people reacted accordingly. The problems online didn't start in earnest until a bunch of people were convinced to pretend, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that online spaces were a real thing where Important Stuff happened.
I think the problem is, negative opinion stand out so much that they look like a lots, even when there are nnot that many.
It is the entrenched media and the politicians amplifying this because the narrative is no longer in their control.
Spoiler it’s not social media anymore, it’s just media.
Sure, but it's become a major issue with social media too because of the ease and ability to amplify things that aren't even something major or regional media would cover and profitable media still has some incentive to not be completely inaccurate because of liability. Now you can have the dumbest people with no concern for liability, because they own nothing and don't really have any source of income, making factually inaccurate AI assisted posts, videos, images, etc that inflame the general public who do no verification or fact checking.
Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.
Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.
It's also not democracy, and never has been (with rare exceptions).
Yeah, we have never had what the Greeks would consider a true 'demos' in the U.S. (besides maybe at our founding) so democracy might not be a good word for our system. Its more-like enslavement through the tyranny of the majority.
Social network -> social media -> media
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.
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
People saying "fake news always existed" are trying to explain that the quantity of it is not so different as many modern commentaries seem to think. 25 years ago, the kind people Tweeting about how protests are satanic weren't stewing in impotence, they were writing church leaflets about how Pokemon and the New World Order were satanic.
It's not wrong to say "fake news always existed" -- it radicalized Heinlein into becoming a hard-right conservative in the 40's, for example. It's been around since the beginning of the republic.
It is completely wrong to say or imply that quantity of it hasn't changed with social media. All of the Satanic panic church leaflets you speak of -- in aggregate -- had infinitesimally small reach compared to a single Facebook post.
Inform but also misinform
There are two ways to look it this. Either the growth of extremism, or the death of machine politics. Both are happening.
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.
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.
20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.
What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.
and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.
No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.
20 years ago, the President was running a war that was justified by shady supposed intelligence about the enemy having weapons of mass destruction, and was authorizing foreign prisoners to be sent to be tortured in secret sites in Eastern Europe.
50 years ago, the President was supporting numerous brutal authoritarian third-world regimes that routinely used torture and murder. That still happens, but it happened more during the Cold War.
US foreign policy is actually a lot more moral now than it was during the Cold War. I think this probably has more to do with how much harder it is to hide things from the masses than it does with a change of heart, but the fact remains.
It sounds more like too much democracy, riling up and playing to the angry crowd. Plato spoke of this.
> 20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.
lol
The cynicism in these comments is proving their point.
When people don't learn to use tech, it's used against them by those seeking fun, power and profit.
I think that removes agency and responsibility from the public.
The truth is that people like outrage and outrageous content.
Boring, even handed content does not get engagement.
We have to call out human nature to be able to reckon with it.
The public learning technology removes their agency from themselves to be competent in literate in the use of those technologies for themselves, and to recognize it being used against them.
This is what I meant. Is that what you are saying removes agency from the individual?
Absolutely, even here it’s all infiltrated by china
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.
The stability of autocracy is greatly exaggerated. It often can't even withstand the leader dying. Government stability is the great feature of democracy. I'm not quite as confident as I used to be, but I'm still pretty confident that my country will have a new leader in 2029 and that there will not be a violent civil war accompanying the transition.
a hallmark of fascism and dictatorships is the capture of media, and the censorship of it.
i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.
Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.
Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.
You just need to go one step further. The fear of billionaires buying media is used to justify increased government control of media and ultimately leads to a ministry of truth.
Once the ministry of truth gains power, democracy is finished.
The extremely unpopular citizen's united supreme court case was in many ways a last ditch attempt to prevent the creation of the ministry of truth. It likely won't last.
In the US, social media has been captured by propaganda not because an authoritarian government has made it so through law and violence, but because the consumers like the propaganda.
The current situation is the result of free speech and consumers being able to choose the kind of content that they enjoy.
It is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that your argument in effect logically implies that free speech should be further curtailed and that elites (but the Right Elites) should be in control of the sources of content.
Which is a defensible position to take, actually. But people generally don't take it because reduction in free speech and consumer choice is anti-democratic. So the essence of this position is actually that we have too much democracy, not too little.
what is your solution tho? only government-sanctioned speech allowed, for the sake of democracy?
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.
By what metric has it worked well?
As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
> As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".
Yeah, I don't like how people choose to communicate on the internet either. But that doesn't make it "not free speech."
In case my point was missed, I was doubting the "people" element of the communication, not the "free speech" (although my opinions on that have also changed since my idealistic early internet days).
Compared to everything else. Not that it is great, but it is still the best we have found.
That said, social media is not free communication.
> If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy
That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.
You're working backwards from "I don't like what people are saying" to "the communication is not legitimate".
I have seen no evidence that "actual humans are the small minority".
But people aren't communicating freely. They are being throttled, shadow banned, refused etc. In some cases these are political candidates. Since this is one of the main channels of consumption these obvious and well documented manipulations are having a massive impact on political outcomes.
It's hardly the "freely communicating" part that's harming democracy. I find it hard to believe you're making this argument in good faith.
"Free communication" is specifically held up as a threat to democracy by current leaders in quite a few states. For instance, Macron and Merz in France and Germany have both recently explictly comdemned free communication, that isn't filtered and gatekept by some "common framework" or government agency, as a threat to democracy. Probably because this communication is producing social movements in these countries that the state cannot control.
And if this isn't US-centric enough for you, the previous US administration created a "Disinformation Governance Board" specifically to address the threats that they felt free communication among the people was posing to democracy, taking action to pressure corporate actors to censor disfavored popular speech in attempt to circumvent first amendment protections. At least the current administration isn't really pretending that attacking free speech is protecting democracy somehow.