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Comment by gjulianm | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".

Yes it is. Polarization is increasing in a lot of countries, and there is heavy criticism. But while US news are exposed to the rest of the world, news from EU countries aren't as much. That's why you don't see "Facebook is damaging democracy" takes from EU countries. At least from what I see in Spain (I can't speak for other countries because I don't read french or german or dutch news) the debate on Facebook (and other social media platforms) effect on democracy is growing bigger each day, specially now with the COVID pandemic.

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Brexit?

I certainly can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't have happened without Facebook.

The thing is that it's the first time were you can really microtarget bigots, racists and xenophobes. And that's what makes it frightening. Especially when everybody nowadays has his own brand of reality.

Note: Despite the fact that I think Brexit is a devastatingly bad idea I don't mean to imply that leave voters are bigots or racists. Brexit is just a great example about undue influence on a referendum.

E: Removed redundancy

> Note: Despite the fact that I think Brexit is a devastatingly bad idea I don't mean to imply that leave voters are bigots or racists.

All the bigots and racists did vote leave though.

There was a strong racist undertone to the campaign. In my family we used to joke about my kids grandparents being mildly racist. The leave campaign helped turn that up a notch.

Sadly Brexit is a product of the "mainstream" rightwing media in the UK who've been lying about Europe for decades. Remember the UK media are explicitly political; Johnson was even employed as a journalist for a while on a higher salary than the one he gets as Prime Minister.

Exactly.

I live in California, and recently had a conversation with a family member in The Hague.

She was telling me about her frustrations with Anti-Maskers and Covid-deniers she has been arguing with locally.

Apparently these are not just US political issues.

Honest question -- do you think that without Facebook there will be no tensions between anti-maskers and people who insist on wearing masks everywhere? Is FB really to blame here?

Yes.

I think it’s a huge amplifier of what would otherwise be fringe ideas.

In the absence of FB, there would be tensions, but no battleground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Franci...

Yes. The progressives were fighting against the mask mandate imposed by the lynching-friendly Republican mayor of SF. They were saying that mask mandates are unscientific, and turned out to be right:

> A study then in 1919 concluded that mandatory mask mandates did not make any difference on epidemic

Without Facebook and the self-amplifying validation bubbles it produces, being "anti-mask" would be seen as just as ridiculous as being an anti-vaccine or a flat-earther. There wouldn't be tensions at all because the fringe group wouldn't have any other way to grow to the point where there could be "tensions".

There seems to be a relatively large covid-denial movement in the Netherlands compared to the rest of Europe, and focussed on The Hague in particular. The administrative capital is a good place to protest when the whole country is around an hour by train.

But, the politics is quite different from the US. Some restaurant and bar owners threatened to stage a protest and re-open against the law, giving six weeks notice that they might do this. This has since been defused.

https://nltimes.nl/2020/12/02/restaurants-bars-defy-dutch-ba...

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