Having Mark Zuckerberg decide who and what can be read on the Internet or even decide the elections is an outcome much worse than ISIS videos or Russian ads in my news feed.
The ability to speak freely and having access to information is not just one virtue like justice or compassion. It is the way by which we create our value.
We should take really seriously any attempt by anyone to restrict it.
As an Australian, I don't have either a first amendment right to free speech, or a second amendment right to bear arms to protect against a tyrannical government.
I do think that we, in the Western world are slowly giving away our freedoms, bit by bit in the name of safety. I do worry that our future is more black mirror than Star Trek.
And I for one do not know how to right this ship, how to bring balance. For people to recognise that with freedom comes responsibility. That you must hold the individual to account for actions, and not let the collective suffer.
The worst case outcome of this is potentially genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
Yes, speech and communication restriction is also potentially a part of this kind of society wide disaster. But that doesn't mean a society can tolerate an unlimited amount of hate speech safely forever.
Ideally the destructive propagandists could be persuaded to shut up or people persuaded to ignore them, and I think if we want to continue with both free speech and not collapse into violence a lot more work needs to be done on this.
It's not simply that we should allow destructive propaganda, period. It's not just wishful thinking that better education would help people see through the bullshit. In the same judgment Brandeis also wrote that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty." He was asking US what WE have done to counter the bad speech that's all around us.
How much time, money and energy have we devoted to the cause of exposing the haters for the hypocrites they are and demolishing their arguments to the point that not a stone is left upon another, using every non-violent action available to us, before we all ran to Uncle Sam and asked him to spank those bad boys on our behalf?
So you're right, a lot more work needs to be done. But not by the government. It's only because the rest of us have been so careless that destructive propaganda is having a field day rummaging through our democracy. The people who have a duty to produce better speech includes everyone from the CEOs of big social media companies to every last user who saw something bad but went "eh, I don't have time for this."
The cost of giving up free speech is unconscionable, but the cost of maintaining it isn't trivial, either.
Not only is our electorate not very well educated, but if anything, we've seen that the wide availability of literally all human knowledge, which should lead to the best ideas if information = good decisions, has galvanized all parties involved to their own ideas and utterly ruined the concept of compromise. Even the most minor concessions to the other side (whichever other side it might be) is interpreted as weakness, so no politicians compromise, so nothing gets done because no given party ever controls the entire Government. Heck, in the USA, the GOP currently controls the executive and legislative branches and still can do nothing due to their own internal fragmentation.
I'm not sure if the solution is less information, less free speech, that feels wrong to me. But at the same time it's clear what we're doing now is not even remotely working. It's breaking the entire system.
I couldn't tell you what the official position of either major party is, besides outlawing bumpstocks, while the country is in the midst of an opioid overdose epidemic.
The visibility would allow the voter to make a less opaque choice, and bring accountability upon the elected official.
I'm not saying free speech isn't the answer. I don't have the answer. But the risks are greater than you say.
Especially weird since Facebook will happily take over old media's advertisers base and then charge them for access to their own audience at the other end. It's already happening.
I think the assertion here is more subtle: newspapers are really the only outlets attacking social media and claiming it brainwashes people. This isn't something that ever comes up in other discussions or forums as far as I can tell. Certainly I discuss politics with my own friends and Facebook or Twitter are not at the top of their lists of concerns.
In contrast, much of the traditional press publishes hysterical clickbaity screeds like "6 ways social media has become a direct threat to democracy" almost every day. They're obsessed with the topic. But we've seen this all before. It used to be that Google News was the bogeyman.
It is reasonable to point out journalists talk about this issue far greater issue than other classes of people, and that maybe this issue - if it exists at all - is really not as dramatic as they make it out to be.
Just because our reach is too short for you to notice it does not mean we don't exist.
The Telegraph has a good meta-discussion on this topic, about how modern "liberal elites" (ugh, hate that name) have embraced totalitarianism:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/12/brexit-barcelona-...
(unfortunately it's paywalled)
When a billionaire newspaper owner like Omidyar writes an article in the Washington Post that repeats dubious conspiracy theories, calls targeted ads "dark posts", and just in general argues repeatedly for people exactly like himself to control the flow of information on the internet, this is not based on anything new. It certainly isn't anything to do with social media.
It's just the same thing that's been going on for millenia - people in power getting scared and confused when the little people start rebelling, and concluding that censorship and control is the answer. If Trump had been elected in the 1990's exactly the same kind of article would have been written but instead of "social media" it'd have been talking about "the internet superhighway" and "the World Wide Web" instead, as that'd have been the newest form of information dispersal at the time.
I wrote this in 2014: http://markos.gaivo.net/articles/chirp-squawk-cackle-or-honk...
However I effectively stopped using Twitter in 2011 for these same reasons and have been arguing about dangers of Twitter, FB and ilk even before then. Regretfully in places not well archived. Not that it matters because my reach is practically non-existent. I was also far from being original or pioneering.
You argued that Twitter is vacuous, empty, filled with half or quarter baked ideas and that the brevity of messages leads to anti-intellectual arguments. That it's a notch above monkey speak. And you speculated that this may have some sort of impact on society, possibly, or maybe it was just useless and a missed opportunity.
I actually never used Twitter and actively avoid it, for all the reasons you give. Still, I wouldn't argue it's a threat to democracy. The sort of people who get into empty headed Twitter fights weren't going to write rational, well thought out essays if Twitter didn't exist. They'd just not write at all.