Once considered a boon to democracy, social media looks like its nemesis

Now that HRC lost the fault now lies allegedly with social media and evil foreigners.

It's like people blaming comic books, TV, rock music and video games for what they see as the failings of youth.

Acknowledging that the Democrats chose poor candidates in Gore and Clinton and that winning three Presidential terms in a row is hard is apparently harder than blaming people for voting the 'wrong' way on some new media development.

Clinton spent 1.2Bn and had loads of young people working on media. They probably weren't just telling truths about Trump. But apparently a few hackers around the place were vastly better than them.

Obama was lauded for using "Big Data" and "Data Science" to rally voters. It's not hard to guess where his team got the data from.

Now the same thing worked against, for better or worse, people are going out of the way to chastise social media.

Where was this concern when the same companies try and collect as much information as they can - user preferences, tastes, political bends - all in the name of "enhancing" experience. There were tons of articles written on praising the same companies on how clever they actually were.

Lastly, it is funny that economist etc are acting holier than thou when they themselves would be collecting some form of data from their readers to enhance ad revenues etc.

IMHO, its not social media rather letting the collection of personal information get out of hand which is at fault.

So yeah, I'll sign on to "gaming social media kills the democracy." The question is, what are we going to do about it? As an individual you don't have to participate in social media, sure, but that counts about as much as your vote does.

The reality is that if there were still journalists doing investigative journalism on par with Woodward and Bernstein and if Americans were getting their news from someone with the gravitas and ethical backbone of Edward R Murrow or Walter Cronkite, these "fake news" stories would be laughed at. But because our schools fail to teach critical thinking and our news either fails to inform people or cannot even interest people enough to watch, social media is the only way we have left for people to consume content and become educated. But since it's an open channel that anyone can participate in, is it any wonder that people would seek to co-opt it for their own purposes? It's little more than a modern day soap box and people have been bloviating their self-serving narratives that way for generations. What's changed isn't social media, it's the lack of adults with professional ethics supplying a baseline reality from which opinions must derive.

This is our generation's "yellow journalism" and it's a reminder of what happens when there's no one who takes on and is recognized for playing the role of establishing that baseline of accepted fact. Social media's reach is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

This reminds me of this CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

When you use social media to influence elections in a neighbor of a geopolitical rival, don't be surprised when the same geopolitical rival learns how to use social media against you.

The root problem is this: America has slipped for a long time now. It has at its core been corrupted systemically by a destructive value system. Its culture is now based on the idea that to dominate those around oneself is the right thing to do (on a personal, social, national, international and worldwide level).

And those who feel the need to play this game will dominate. They will reinforce and perpetuate this vicious circle - until society collapses. So you might want start counteracting now.

Apart from what are mostly just biased judgements used to drive forward the narrative, there are 2 basic misconceptions that the article is trying to pedal as fact.

1: That democracy is supposed to inherently solve these issues; there's a clear reason why America was not founded as a democratic country. The founders of the US saw democracy in the same way they viewed autocracy. They called for a careful balance of different political systems in order to minimize the harm of each of these. Democracy was specifically avoided because pure democracy quickly devolves (and is synonymous) to "mobocracy." The article tries to place the blame for this on everything other than the system itself. However, the reason why these issues exist even in a system that is partially democratic (and obviously much more democratic than it was when the United States (or any other country mentioned) was founded) is because they have not taken over. Mob rule is slow to come to power, and this should be a warning to people that we're nearing the edge of the cliff (rather than that some have cheated the system into submission). It's also worth noting that democracy should never imply a system in which everyone independently forms views, as that is quite clearly impossible. Leading to the second point:

2: "Outside influences" are supposedly ruining political discourse. This idea just makes no sense to me. The blame placed on Russia for influencing the 2016 election is effectively for generating discussion. It is not for changing votes, because as far as we know that was never done. It's also not for lying to people; to argue that Russia was in the wrong for lying to people is 100% disingenuous because the authors of this article are just as happy lying to people in order to drive forth their own narrative. It seemingly blames the increased political division on right-wing politics by arguing how everything from Gamergate to Wikipedia has caused people to become more right-leaning. Ignoring the fact that they mischaracterize the entire movement of Gamergate (equating it to alt-right politics by linking it to 4chan, when in fact Gamergate was almost exclusively originating from 8chan, saying that it is trolling rather than a legitimate opinion to hold, etc.) and lie about Wikipedia's political agenda (it's quite easy to see that the major editors on Wikipedia are heavily left-leaning based on the frequent bans given to right-leaning editors), it's immediately clear from the graph showing party division that Democrats have "radicalized" far more than their Republican counterparts. In this scenario, they are using blatant lies and scare tactics to get across their opinion. How is this different at all from what they blame Russia/right-wing media/4chan for? Sure Russia might be using fake accounts to manipulate the public, but if the only solutions you can propose are limiting freedom of speech, you are doing much more to ruin democracy.

Ah, who am I kidding. Let's blame Zuckerberg and the Russians!

One of the first effects is that the only thing that gets visibility when there are 'opposed' groups (in other words groups that do not upvote one another -- this effect is even more exagerrated when we introduce downvotes) is the largest plurality. One view has 51% of the support, the other has 49%. The 49%, even though it represents practically half of all views, would be buried anytime it's mentioned. You'd expect there to be about a 49% chance of any comment you read of being a 49% view. Instead you'll read each and every single 51% comment until you get down to the bottom sorted 49% views. Consequently we see groups begin to splinter off into their own little spaces where they can discuss things separate from the 51%. And just like that you have fermenting radicalism.

An analogy I quite like is to imagine we're trying to solve a math problem. The correct answer to this problem is 0. However, one side believes the answer is absolutely at least 50. And the other side believes the answer must be no more than -50. When these two groups remain within contact, they counter balance each other. But now let's isolate these groups. In the past when the -50 side chose to go -60 there would be some push back against that and it would help create a more of a central equilibrium. But in isolation without opposition, -60 sounds awesome. Why not -70, or even lower? And on the other side an equal but opposite push for 60, 70 and more is simultaneously happening.

The more segregated we are, the more out of touch with reality we become.

Anyone here want to take a guess at which of these posts are paid propaganda? :P