You’re both right which is the real conundrum. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that conspiracy theories and propaganda in our hyperconnected social media fueled internet are incredibly dangerous and rot the foundations of democracy. Democracy can not survive if these kinds of things are left unchecked. By the same token however any mechanism that immediately springs to mind to combat them is ripe for abuse and easily subverted by fascists and totalitarians. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, only that we desperately need one.
TL;DR: of that whole thing boils down to “the problem is too hard to solve and all the solutions are worse than the problem so don’t even try”. I don’t agree with the premise because if we accept it, then democracy is doomed.
We can not have a functioning society when we can’t even get a majority of the citizens to agree on basic aspects of reality and half the people are convinced the other half are lizard people that are putting mind control drugs in the water supply. A functioning democracy requires an informed and educated populace, and unchecked propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories lead to the opposite of that, particularly when you have a wealthy group that profits from spreading it.
Technology advances quickly and lawmaking advances slowly. 50 years ago, this wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem, because the flow of information would be a lot slower, and fewer people would be exposed to these things. Today, Trump posts something hate-filled on the internet and his followers everywhere in the country see it immediately. Same goes for any other person with social media influence. If Elon Musk posts something provably false, tens of millions of people consume it. A hundred people can post the proof that it’s false within minutes, and a fraction of those people will see it and even fewer will care.
The problem isn’t the speech, the problem is the platform they’re given.
The platform is a tool, and like most tools it can be used for both good and evil. I agree it’s making the problem significantly worse, but hyper focusing on just the platforms while ignoring the people using them doesn’t seem like the right approach either. I don’t know how to preserve the positive aspects of platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube while also preventing them from being abused to spread hate and lies. I feel like there must be something that can be done to at least improve the situation a little. The various “community notes” features I don’t think were a terrible first step, although they’re also far from a solution. It’s a complicated problem with a lot of potential pitfalls, but one I think is going to be critical to solve and soon because the problem isn’t going away, as long as we have an internet it’s here to stay.
You’re both right which is the real conundrum. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that conspiracy theories and propaganda in our hyperconnected social media fueled internet are incredibly dangerous and rot the foundations of democracy. Democracy can not survive if these kinds of things are left unchecked. By the same token however any mechanism that immediately springs to mind to combat them is ripe for abuse and easily subverted by fascists and totalitarians. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, only that we desperately need one.
TL;DR: of that whole thing boils down to “the problem is too hard to solve and all the solutions are worse than the problem so don’t even try”. I don’t agree with the premise because if we accept it, then democracy is doomed.
We can not have a functioning society when we can’t even get a majority of the citizens to agree on basic aspects of reality and half the people are convinced the other half are lizard people that are putting mind control drugs in the water supply. A functioning democracy requires an informed and educated populace, and unchecked propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories lead to the opposite of that, particularly when you have a wealthy group that profits from spreading it.
Technology advances quickly and lawmaking advances slowly. 50 years ago, this wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem, because the flow of information would be a lot slower, and fewer people would be exposed to these things. Today, Trump posts something hate-filled on the internet and his followers everywhere in the country see it immediately. Same goes for any other person with social media influence. If Elon Musk posts something provably false, tens of millions of people consume it. A hundred people can post the proof that it’s false within minutes, and a fraction of those people will see it and even fewer will care.
The problem isn’t the speech, the problem is the platform they’re given.
The platform is a tool, and like most tools it can be used for both good and evil. I agree it’s making the problem significantly worse, but hyper focusing on just the platforms while ignoring the people using them doesn’t seem like the right approach either. I don’t know how to preserve the positive aspects of platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube while also preventing them from being abused to spread hate and lies. I feel like there must be something that can be done to at least improve the situation a little. The various “community notes” features I don’t think were a terrible first step, although they’re also far from a solution. It’s a complicated problem with a lot of potential pitfalls, but one I think is going to be critical to solve and soon because the problem isn’t going away, as long as we have an internet it’s here to stay.
That’s a fair conclusion to draw, but that very well might mean you have to physically fight for the outcome you want.