It's incredible to me how contentious the inauguration of this center/right Democrat is. Truly we live in interesting times.
Social media was a mistake.
Social media becomes a body politic snatching parasite when it generates unique, algorithmically (engagement-driven!) views for each individual.
By all means, use it to rank things, but showing the numbers just triggers the wrong behaviour. Both in terms of creating addiction in the users, but also in terms of poisoning civil discussion and incentivising clever comebacks over good-faith debate.
Except for dissenting opinions, obfuscated in light gray.
I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause.
In order for fringe view points to be broadly accepted they need to be "approved"/"verified" by a trusted party.
Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred, every fringe viewpoint has been stamped as "valid" by appearing on these "news" organizations.
Social media I think exacerbated this problem by reducing revenues for news media companies so they all had to focus on content that was more emotional, rather than informative. And if they can stir up an emotion people tune in.
Then those viewpoints are shared across social media to create a larger audience, again linking back to these "verified" sources, and you get a pretty vicious flywheel effect.
I would love to see what social media looked like if the news went back to reporting just the news.
Like in school, the who, what, when, and that's it. Now when you turn on the news it feels like turning on Inside Edition when I was a kid. Here are the ten things that can kill you in your house hold... tune in after the commercial break to find out.
If our news organizations actually followed these practices it would be interesting to see if social media in and of itself may not be as detrimental as it appears to be today.
There's an opinion piece today in the NYT which argues that the present state of politics, with the rightward and even reactionary shift in certain areas of Republicanism, has been 40 years in the making:
Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trump’s rise since the 1980s.
A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White house in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on “welfare queens.”
The full piece is here:
This piece is a perfect example of what raiyu was pointing out.
This is why a lot of countries have state-sponsored media with an obligation to report objectively, but without the pressure to be profitable. With news anchors and journalists that can build up trust and integrity over decades, without the need to sensationalize everything for the sake of viewer numbers. Obviously not a silver bullet either; if there are government officials breathing down their necks instead of shareholders it's probably not much of an improvement, but if enough independence can be maintained it seems to definitely help keeping the discussion civilized.
With a population of that size there are too many minority needs that go under represented. This leads to people feeling disenfranchised. Eventually something has to fill the void. Normally it’s some form of subgroup. It can be BLM, Antifa, Maga cult. By centralizing power into the federal government, which is too remote to deal with needs at the local level, all these groups can’t improve things. Riots and violence occur.
Trying to solve a social problem technologically is doomed to fail. We know from history that forcing people to think something they don’t want to causes oppression, resentment, and leads to upheaval. We need to invest more in education so that ordinary people can recognize lies, and we need character in our leaders so that they hold bad actors accountable.
Yes, the determined will always find a way to socialize with only like-minded people, but tech companies don't have to optimize for it. They could sacrifice some ad-revenue by optimizing for diverse thought, not echo chambers. And that would be a hell of a lot more aminable to free speech than picking and choosing what opinions belong on their platforms.
that is my attempt at HN "argument by analogy"
Give better weapons to warring tribes and watch what happens.
Similarly, implement likes and upvotes, and use ML recommenders to push people into echo chambers, and watch what happens.
Bezos, Suckerburg along with all the others worth 10's of billions will be just fine. It's the little guy that is going to get crushed. Anyway, this is all just a distraction to keep you stupid, tired and poor.
The only people who object to the judgment that the election was free and fair are people who aim to disrupt democracy, and they deserve a slap in the face.
Edit: spelling
In fact, most of the "outrage" experienced on the right is intentionally drummed up, based on almost nothing, for purely selfish reasons. Consider the constantly inflamed talking heads on right-wing media outlets, who abide by the simple rule to always, always be angry.
And that falsehood is being perpetuated by the president and some republicans.
That is very serious, it is one of the main causes of the capitol events and the reason it’s so insidious is the fact that it is false.
There is really no way to emphasise enough that the election was proper and claims otherwise are false, as has been repeatedly shown in courts, even with republican appointed judges.
The capitol riot was not the logical consequence of a group of rational people protesting an illegitimate election foisted by a tyrannical regime. It was, instead, an outpouring of irrational emotion, draped in the language of revolution against tyranny.
Europe != the ethical measuring stick for the rest of the world.
Only by far-right nutcases.
> in most other developed countries he'd be considered center-right, or center at the minimum
I read this frequently here, but when I look at parties considered center-right I don't see much alignment with even the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. For instance, I do not think Angela Merkel and Joe Biden are roughly equivalent in positions; I think Merkel is measurably to the right.