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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, best thing these regulations could achieve is making Facebook work "worse", that is, not as invasive/addictive and thus not as harmful, and enable some competition.

I can't expect that in a democratic society the very root of the problem with social media - that free speech worked well only in times when printing a pamphlet required some money, connections and education and set a high social and intellectual threshold for doing so, and simply does NOT make any benefit to the society when ANYONE can post on Facebook. Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote, becoming a snake that eats it's own tail.

Sadly, this will eventually result in end of the Western world as we know it and there is nothing we can do.

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> Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote

Um, what now? Are you saying universal suffrage is a bad thing? Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?

Uh, children? Non-citizens?

> Uh, children? Non-citizens?

The real answer was people who aren't "wealthy property owners."

Often people cite people who are not interested and/or not following politics and cannot make an informed decision.

That is the central debate around forced voting.

Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent.

Just like "communism" (Soviet "socialism") stopped working when variety of goods in demand became so large, and life cycles of products became so short, that centralised planning no longer had any chance not to mismanage it - that is, simply due to technological change, or in communist terms, "progress of means of production", democracy seems to stop working when free speech becomes really, really free.

I'd go on to say that, as a broad generalisation, rights and liberties of the Western world that we value so much are valuable and positively contribute to society only as long as they can in reality be only used by elites.

Sadly, concept of human rights (late XVIII century) largely preceded industrialisation, and thus the prospect of exponential economic growth that will some day make "universal" rights REALLY "universal" - evaded imagination of their inventors. They saw those rights, as a matter of course, as "universal for people like themselves", just as they didn't think of them as pertaining to women - not because they were especially sexist, but because it just didn't cross their minds...

>> Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?

> Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent.

Did you answer the inverse of my question? It sounds like you think only wealthy property owners should have the right to vote (e.g. something like the pre-Jacksonian era franchise), is that correct?

Yes, or something like that. People who can be expected to be responsible (they have a lot to lose) and who will never come to depend on the government, but rather, government will always depend on them.

Expanding suffrage to people who depend on the government rather than other way around is easy to explain (populism: "let me create millions of new voters, they will be super happy and all vote for me"), but destructive and impossible to undo. And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech...

Of course, there could be in theory a multitude of ways to fix it, not just by limiting suffrage (like poll tax for example), but all of them unrealistic.

>> It sounds like you think only wealthy property owners should have the right to vote...

> Yes, or something like that....

> And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech...

Do you also think it's a bad thing for people who aren't wealthy property owners to have free speech rights as well?

Free speech rights themselves is OK, but when they also vote - it becomes a problem.

When free speech could only be made use of by relatively wealthy and well-educated classes - simply due to technology - universal suffrage wasn't that bad - because political thinking of common people was still guided by those wealthy and well-educated classes, and because they weren't (and aren't) very capable of critical thinking, they were "captive audience" of a sort and mostly taken along for a ride.

But now when social media really gives usable "free speech" rights to everyone, these people live in the world where Deep State injects them with mind control chips, and White House is run by a sect of pedophiles and Trump is the only person who could save us from them...

And this free speech made universal suffrage a real, and i believe unsolvable, problem. Maybe only solvable through a social collapse (like in 1991 Soviet Union) with a new state taking the territory of the previous one, voiding it, and creating a new regime with very limited suffrage.

Free speech on the internet worked fine before companies developed algorithms to feed you content that made them the most $$. I would also say there's a problem in traditional media - something shared with social media.

Outrage sells. We have a bunch of people walking around being angry about shit that is never gonna change, politicians don't give two fucks about (except it gets you to vote for them), and all media are laughing to the bank because of the engagement it drives.

> Free speech on the internet worked fine before companies developed algorithms to feed you content that made them the most $$.

Free speech on the internet worked fine back before everyone was on the internet - I don't think it's easy to tell if the shift was solely due to companies coming along with echo chamber algorithms or if it's an issue with most people not being able to handle being anonymous by default. I'm not trying to say it's definitely one way or the other (or some other way I can't recognize) - but I think we've got a very murky study with a lot of confounding variables.

It's not their fault that they have developed algorithms - after all, this is just survival of the fittest in the open market.

Problem is exactly that with social media, masses, for the first time in history, actually got the free speech rights. Rights themselves are the problem. Founding Fathers who invented free speech could not foresee social media just as they couldn't foresee AR-15.

Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated. Regulation of media can work. The thing is, TV wasn't algo driven. Facebook is a WMD for misinformation, it's just devastatingly effective, capable of toppling (or raising) governments and should have special rules.

We also spent trillions on endless wars, sacrificed our own to the tens of thousands, and others to the millions.

These wars stopped with social media. They can't possibly happen if everybody has a voice and can call BS when they see it.

If you start to regulate media this way, you will destroy this and we will tumble head-in to yet another war.

We literally just ended our last war just over a month ago - I think it's a bit too early to celebrate how much of a peace loving society we have become. The war contractors were milking Afganistan for decades and haven't needed a new target - let's see if we can go for a year at peace before we declare pacifism achieved.

We haven't declared any wars in the past five years either.

Administrations used to hiding bad failures can no longer do so.

You can't have another Nayirah testimony if everybody is gonna point out what a lie it all is online.

> Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated.

No, it wasn't.

Partisan polarization may have been, but only because the divide between the major parties didn't capture the major salient ideological divisions in the country, so that the polarization that existed didn't align with partisan identity.

This had nothing to do with TV regulation (and, indeed, predates TV), and everything to do with the long period of partisan realignment between the New Deal and the mid-1990s.

Not to mention, the cold war, the external threat, which was widely accepted. Once the wall fell, that unifying factor disappeared.

There is a direct contradiction to this in recent history. The Iraq War started before Facebook was a thing. The false story about WMDs as pretense to the war was widely circulated by traditional media. 15,000 US soliders and 500,000 Iraqis were killed. The most comparable thing attributed to Facebook is the Myanmar coup where around 800 people were killed.

>"Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated."

Cynically speaking, if you are able to control the narrative it stands to reason that there would be less polarization simply because you are manipulating what the public is being told.

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...." ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

I think it still works quite well. On the contrary, polarization was boosted when platforms started to appoint favorites and actively promoted and disincentivised certain content. Made people angrier of course because they were treated unfairly.

So if we see regulation, especially content regulation, polarization is likely to increase as long as not every dissident gets banned.

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