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Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like?

There are at least a couple flaws in this viewpoint: that social media is mostly controlled by a privileged few, and with enough resources an individual can gain more votes (if you consider an account as a vote). But social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation, and the result is kind of gross sometimes.

In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.

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Yeah, I think that's hard to say without taking into account the issue of social media algorithms. These algorithms purposefully amplify some of the most toxic content out there, so I think gaming the system to harm democracy would be considerably more difficult if social media feeds were just a chronological list of friends' posts.

Even without the algorithm, though, I also believe that humans just aren't evolved to have some kinds of discussions asynchronously, remotely behind a screen. I've found myself needing to disconnect from social media because it leads me to having negative feelings about people that I know I like. E.g. after the overturning of Roe v. Wade there were some posts by family members who I know and love, even though I know we don't share the same politics. After seeing their posts the first thought that went through my mind was "WTF is wrong with these people??" But if we had been discussing it face-to-face, I'm sure we would both have been more respectful of the other person's viewpoint, or at least would have agreed to disagree and move on.

Everyone has seen it (and probably done it) - said something extremely hostile in an online forum that we would never say face-to-face.

To refine the analogy a little more then: regarding the algorithms, maybe it's more like direct democracy but with a really powerful propaganda department (that's run by a sort of evil AI) influencing lots of votes?

I very much agree with everything else you said.

Why stand with the direct democracy? It's not like people decide anything that matters.

The content promoted by the algorithm results in higher user engagement because people like it. If they didn’t, the algorithm would have been changed to promote other kinds of content instead.

It turns out that people are more likely to engage with content they don't like, at least when it comes to factional politics. So that's what ends up being promoted the most.

Define "like it". Many people also drink themselves to death or OD on heroin because they "like it".

I don't think it's that hard to differentiate between things people do for enjoyment that they think of as a positive influence, and addictive substances that can fleetingly make people "feel better" but are extremely harmful.

Most addicts may say they enjoy getting high, while even simultaneously talking about how drugs have ruined their lives. The fact that social media companies have hacked the same brain pathways doesn't mean the answer should be "it's fine, they all like it!"

Yes and different cultures have different appetites for these vices. For example, in East Asia it's much more acceptable to gamble than it is in most Western countries. In most of Europe it's more acceptable to do drugs than it is in the US, and the US finds it much more acceptable to do drugs than East Asia does. In East Asia it's common to be openly drunk, at night, in public. In the US it's much more acceptable to enjoy firearms than it is in Europe or East Asia.

There's no easy answer to "this is toxic, we should ban it." Everyone has a different definition of toxic. Cultures form around different norms. Social media, like HN, spans multiple continents and cultures. I don't think you'll ever be able to get all of the userbase of any of these sites to agree on what is toxic and what is not.

I'm of the opinion that the user should be able to:

1. Audit their algorithmic recommender to see which bin they're bucketed into.

2. Adjust the weights on the recommender

But anything more, any form of broad agreement on toxicity, is asking for humans around the world to land at a single definition of what is good and what is bad.

Controversial content is the one getting promoted more. More often not because of the content itself, but because of the amount of comments (read, fights) attached to it.

> These algorithms purposefully amplify some of the most toxic content out there

No, these algorithms (often) purposefully amplify content that increases the engagement rate or "average time on page" metric.

It's just that toxic content coincidentally often has high values on this metric:

- if you agree with the content, you stay on the page longer to read more of what you love

- if you disagree with the (toxic) content, you perhaps invest a lot of time to post strong counterarguments (increases engagement rate and average time on page)

So, the previous point still stands. These algorithms purposefully amplify content that increases engagement, which often happens to be toxic. Ergo, these algorithms often purposefully amplify toxic content.

The algorythm doesn't care what its amplifying, only that the amplification increases engagement. Toxic is a correlation, not a causation.

If it's known to be a correlation, then it's disingenuous to say they're innocent for simply wanting to amplify engagement.

> If it's known to be a correlation, then it's disingenuous to say they're innocent for simply wanting to amplify engagement.

But if it's know to be just a correlation, it is a defamation to claim that this was done on purpose ("purposefully").

If you know exposure to radiation causes cancer, then you shouldn't let people continue to mine despite simply wanting more uranium or what have you for philanthropic purposes.

Purposefully is a red herring. Try knowingly.

You seem to be confusing correlation with causation. Correlation is effectively coincidence. You can't expect anyone to make decisions - business or otherwise - based on coincidence. In fact, we attemp to solve too many symptoms based on correlation. We can't keep doing that. It's creating more noise while true root problems continue and expand.

The irony is that these machine learning algorithms are effectively coincidence machines. There's no rhyme or reason as to why they work once you have even just a handful of neural net layers, and people invest quite a lot into these magic recommendation machines.

As for toxicity, I don't think there's one magical root cause for all of it. And I'd argue that most features and designs to increase engagement _are_ one of the many causes for people to create lucrative polarizing digital content.

edit: Also I'm not sure how my original post was confusing correlation with causation. You can replace "correlation" with "coincidence" there without issue.

A coincidence is a good starting point for discovering things. A natural next step would be to figure out how to dissect trained networks and turn them into proper models.

I hope we can figure it out! I'm a big fan of explainable AI initiatives. Though I have a feeling it won't be for another decade or so before anything huge is discovered, considering how long the technology has been around.

They're tuned to increase engagement. They figure out based on inputs what does that. There's no morality, no value judgement, etc. They try to increase engagement.

Why toxic (which is subjective) appeals to so many humans is really the question here. The algorythms has no say in that.

> Ergo, these algorithms often purposefully amplify toxic content.

"Purposefully" means that the algorithms were developed with the purpose to amplify toxic content. I seriously doubt this is the case. Amplifying toxic content is rather an unintended side effect of the metrics that the algorithms optimize for.

Is it your position then that since the developers had neutral intent, therefore the algorithms do not need to be adjusted?

> Is it your position then that since the developers had neutral intent, therefore the algorithms do not need to be adjusted?

No, my position is that since the developers had neutral intent, it is defamation to claim that these algorithms purposefully amplify toxic content.

I'm not sure how "defamation" is germane to the discussion, or the original point that you responded to.

The algorithm is not looking for toxic content to amplify. It's looking for content that would attain the most engagement of its users. If you consider the posts to be toxic, then maybe you are in a minority.

This doesn't appear to be a response to any of the content of the comment it is posted in reply to. Or indeed the entire thread.

Yes it does. The amplified content is just content that attracts the most engagement. It is not a reflection on how "toxic" the content is. If someone considers the post to be toxic and does not engage with it, then that person is not the majority of users.

This line of argument is exactly why I think intention (mens rea) should be abolished from the legal system completely. Outcomes matter, intentions don't matter. If you don't want to put someone in danger, don't do the thing that may put them in danger. It's up to you to anticipate the consequences of your actions.

It really doesn't matter what the algorithm is meant to do because it's very obvious the material consequences of what it does.

Everyone in this thread but you understands that the even if they are not optimizing for outrage, by optimizing for engagement you implicitly (and objectively) serve more negative/polarizing/divisive content.

At this very moment, the person trending highest across all social media is a sex trafficker hawking his self improvement remote mentorship thing to insecure young men. His basic tactic is to say blatantly misogynistic things to get eyeballs.

I saw youtube's new shorts feature and clicked on it out of curiousity. It gave me a couple funny cat videos and some cooking content copied from tik tok... but after that it was just a doomscroll of the guy I'm talking about above, Prager University, etc.

Youtube has like 2 decades of data on what videos I watch, and it's definitely not that shit, but yet it's clear their algorithm is optimizing to put that in front of my eyes.

Interestingly normal youtube recommendations continue to be pretty good, but the shorts feature is just a cesspool that's far worse than tik tok.

I’m interested that your experience with YouTube recommendations contrasts so drastically with my own!

I watch way too much youtube, to the point that they have lots of data on what I like

> At this very moment, the person trending highest across all social media is a sex trafficker hawking his self improvement remote mentorship thing to insecure young men

Who is this? And what platforms? I'm not seeing anything like this on fb/twtr/ig/tt/yt

His name is Andrew Tate. He’s been making videos for years but blew up recently. I think his primary platform is youtube

I suggest that it might be worth reflecting on what ‘toxic’ means, because it is at least unclear to me, and the term seems to carry a lot of significance in this conversation!

This distinction is needlessly pedantic. While social media companies might not have initially sought to promote toxic content, they have long since known they are effectively doing so and have done very little to stop it. In practice, "content that increases the engagement rate" so frequently means toxic content that it's not a useful distinction.

What metric do you then propose to optimize for to stop promoting "toxic" content?

You do not necessarily need a separate metric, you can filter out toxic content from other engaging content.

> you can filter out toxic content from other engaging content.

If this is your stance: what algorithm do you propose to separate content that is "toxic" from content that is "non-toxic"?

I'm not taking a stance, just pointing out that there does not need to be any single metric you need to optimise for.

Who gets to define what “toxic content” is? Is the Great Barrington Declaration toxic? How about studies that show masks might not work? How about public sourced data showing the IFR of Covid was nowhere near what “the experts” modeled early on?

The owners of the space can make those decisions, and the users can provide feedback, just like it happens now. There's no static status quo where everybody's happy, just like there's no static society.

Don’t optimize, don’t recommend. Chronological timeline of only things you directly subscribed to. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you should have to find it on your own.

My inner Libertarian is screaming, but I would support a "choose your algorithm" law. Wherein social media platforms would be required to allow the user a clear choice to opt-out of algorithmic recommendations. Perhaps even requiring a basic chronological feed.

I know the actual text of the bill would require a lot of finagling and legalese, but that's the concept of what I want.

except recommendation platforms are more popular all the time. ppl will choose the algo feed bc they like it more. idk why but everybody is taking america off the hook for wanting toxic shit and gravitating to it. its at least half a demand side problem.

if u want an example: tiktok has the for you page (algo discovery) and the following page (just ppl u follow). its the fyp where ppl spend time.

Please type out your words in full, using so much texting shorthand significantly detracts from what you are trying to say.

I can't respond to the child comment, so I'll reply here. The "type everything out" must be a generational/cultural thing. Because when I read your comment I literally did not realize you used words like "ppl". I automatically expanded it to people when reading it

If that's true, why is twitter making it so difficult (and more difficult over time) to see only content you follow, and Facebook making it impossible?

You inner Libertarian has the same problem as every other person with that ideology - you are vastly overestimating the knowledge and capabilities of the average user, and the ideas that result will fail in practice. Algorithmic content is a market failure being subsidized by the fact that it helps sell ads. The capitalist greedy function means they're going to keep pushing algo content, because it's the money making engine. If you ban the combination of algorithmic content and targeted advertising, the damage would be vastly reduced (also Meta would implode, because their business is a market failure that only exists because regulators are not enforcing competition laws that prevent the use of free services subsided by ads and other antitrust laws).

To be clear I wasn't proposing a ban, but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.

Yeah, I understood what you said, I just would be against it in general unless advertising is strictly decoupled from it. Even then, I'm not sure there is a huge benefit to it.

There used to be a news app called Pulse that LinkedIn bought and killed. To me, that was the best possible execution of the feed concept. It was essentially RSS with a scrollable feed component. You could browse feeds by category, but it wasn't recommending things based on current interests. If you wanted to go down a right/left wing newshole it was possible, but you had to consciously seek it out and go down it. The app wasn't breadcrumbing you.

> but the requirement to provide non algorithmic alternatives for content feeds.

"Non algorithmic" means "some human creates the content feed by hand". This is also not free of lots of biases and what news portals in the web did in the past.

I think "sort by recent" or filtering are considered "non-algorithmic" in this space.

The answer to that question has nothing to do with my objection. I was simply pointing out the irrelevance of the "original intent" of these algorithms, given that we now know, and have known what they do. Focusing on that downplays their effects, which can indeed be considered their intent nowadays since we have known the effects for a while.

Say you hit a button, and each time you hit it you gain a million dollars. After you hit that button once or twice, you discover that it also causes great harm to other people. If you continue to hit the button, your original intent (when you didn't know it's effects) is no longer relevant to whether or not it you should continue hitting the button, since you would now knowingly be harming people for your own profit. The side-effect is no longer a side-effect. It's just an effect.

To answer your question anyway, perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable, but there's a reason we regulate companies- having some restrictions on profitability can often be a net benefit to society.

> perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable

The problem rather is: how are we supposed to algorithmically measure the well-being of a user?

I'm not sure it is needlessly pedantic.

> In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.

I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want. In other words, if the engagement metric really is responding to how humans prefer to spend their time, this really is a view into what a more technically democratic society looks like.

Personally, I don't like the idea of that and would prefer the thought that these algorithms really are measuring the wrong thing!

To highlight the point I'm making, assuming the above is true, your stance could be summed up as: "yes, humans prefer this content, but we know better and will make the right decision on their behalf"

To re-enforce a sibling comment, being able to choose your own algorithm is exactly how you tease apart these two takes. Twitter supports this (chronological vs. engagement) - I personally opt for chronological. I'd be interested to see the stats on usage of that!

> I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want.

What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.

I think the burden is on you to explain why it's not the case. Nobody is being forced to read/share that content. People are choosing to do so.

You'd be venturing into the realm of psychology for that, but I would argue that short-term engagement != long-term desire. Think of gambling or gaming addictions- nobody's "forcing" those people to engage in behavior against their best interest, but many would argue that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.

> short-term engagement != long-term desire

I agree that it's not, but long-term desires are not all that people have.

> many would argue

Maybe, maybe not, but I would disagree.

> that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.

"freely" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. And a discussion about that is philosophical. They're as free to make that decision as they are to make any other.

If you go to the bookstore and there are two shelves, one of Danielle Steel novels and another of Dan Brown, are you making a free choice to read trashy pulp fiction?

Yes you are, you always have the option to read neither.

The point of a functioning market is that humans choose who they do business with. Both sides of the transaction are responsible for this - if you fill your shelves with trashy pulp fiction and there isn’t a market for that people stop going to your store.

Personally I try to go out of my way to purchase books directly from the author, publisher, a book store with a local presence, and online retailers in that order.

I’ve mostly cut Barnes and Nobel out of my vendor list for this exact reason, their book shelves are full of products I have no interest in - walking into their store has such a high noise to signal ratio that, unless I place my order in advance for a specific product, I don’t bother walking in anymore. The books of value are buried on shelves drown out by heavily marketed pop culture noise; and that’s if I’m lucky, often I have to have it ordered and shipped to store to pick it up locally. They don’t meet my needs for content discovery so I don’t do business with them very often.

> Nobody is being forced to read/share that content.

Those things are literally the result of human and automated research on how to make people read/share content. I wonder what is your definition of "forced".

Social media companies are not beaming information into your brain.

They aren't forcing you to keep your eyes open and see the content on their sites

Your computer can open another web page. You can get off the seat.

Tired of seeing garbage clickbait articles? Block the sites which post that stuff.

Tired of conspiracy theories and gossipy articles? Block the sites and mute/unfollow those people.

Tired of experiencing the world in 140 character chunks? Get off Twitter.

> they have long since known they are effectively doing so and have done very little to stop it

Just because they haven't succeeded does not mean they haven't tried.

> No, these algorithms (often) purposefully amplify content that increases the engagement rate or "average time on page" metric. It's just that toxic content coincidentally often has high values on this metric

Because people democratically choose to engage with it!

I think it is also partially because many people have become accustomed to having a left-leaning media that espouses a certain viewpoint. So in yesteryear the viewpoint might have been very liberal New York or LA, and nowadays it is possible to see a similar "bias" on news outlets like Reddit where the moderation has turned everything into certain left-wing viewpoints US-centric echochambers. A lot of the internet forgets that FOX News is technically a young media network.

And the fact is that most Americans are actually on the fence on the abortion issue, although most people are also against a full-on ban against abortion which the media is focusing on. The media has been presenting a very narrow view in the past, and now you are just getting exposed to the full spectrum of viewpoints on the internet.

Reddit I think is the best counterargument against further moderation of social media. The moderation outside the US at least is wholly haphazard and out-of-touch with mainstream views in said localities. For example if a left-wing American were to actually go around asking how Scandinavians themselves viewed their socialist paradise nordic welfare state as being viable, the response would be something that might be against left-wing interests, and they would be banned on Reddit. Similarly the way the media has supported Muslims and the on-the-ground Islamophobia in Europe and Asia are widely apart, and most of these people would be blanket-banned on Reddit as well.

The algorithms seek to maximize engagement. And it turns out that rage is one really good way to maximize engagement. After being on twitter for a bit over 14 years I deleted my account in May when I realized this is what the algorithms were doing. I'm still detoxing from twitter, but I feel like quitting has been very beneficial for my mental health.

> Even without the algorithm, though, I also believe that humans just aren't evolved to have some kinds of discussions asynchronously, remotely behind a screen.... But if we had been discussing it face-to-face, I'm sure we would both have been more respectful of the other person's viewpoint, or at least would have agreed to disagree and move on.

Yes, this. But what I fear is that heavy use of social media is causing our face-to-face interactions to change for the worse as well. People seem to be getting less respectful in face-to-face interactions as social media led the way towards making it easy to dehumanize the other.

> The algorithms seek to maximize engagement. And it turns out that rage is one really good way to maximize engagement.

I used to think this was only a property of algorithms but I'm not convinced anymore. Any number of link aggregator sites I'm on with no algorithmic surfacing of content, Reddit (at least on the old site), HN, Lobsters, Tildes, etc all have the same effect. Everyone comments on and engages with the rage inducing post. Nuanced, sanguine conversations get maybe an upvote or two but are just a few posters talking. This tracks with my experience on forums back in the '90s where huge hellthreads would spawn and have people arguing for weeks, and every archive of Usenet flamethreads that I've seen.

I don't think the algorithms are helping, but I think this is just a property of socializing in the large. Humans, when socializing in person, have a lot of context. When my friend rants "relationships are terrible they are just adults emotionally manipulating each other" to me, and I have the context of knowing my friend just had a bad breakup, I know the place this is coming from. When someone posts this on Twitter, everyone is up in arms because there's no context. There's other properties of socializing in the large that I suspect leads to the patterns we see in online discourse, but I'm beginning to think that the algorithms are the minor part.

Early twitter didn't have much algorithmic involvement. I recall early twitter being a much chiller place. But in the last couple of years (and especially in the last six months or so) algorithms seemed pretty blatant - getting tweets from people was not following, etc. So while I agree that part if this is " a property of socializing in the large", it seems from experience with early twitter vs late twitter that as the algorithms became a bigger part of the platform, things went downhill.

Twitter has developed norms which prioritize anger. Some fairly prominent folks on Twitter can go weeks without tweeting anything positive. This isn't going away. Much like Reddit has developed norms around downvoting to disagree.

I think you're laser focusing on Twitter because of your experiences on the platform. I only started using Twitter recently as I felt the non-technical content on HN became too one-sided or rage-filled, so I can't offer much observation there, but I've been on non-algorithmic social sites for decades. I've been on HN for over a decade. Heck, you can hop onto Usenet today and see hellthreads still spawning. A Raspberry Pi group I'm in had a (crossposted) hellthread about Apple products.

People respond to rage whether there's algorithms or not. People give others online much less benefit of the doubt than they do in person. I've seen this constant on every non-algorithmic social site I've been on. Mastodon, despite being a much smaller network, also has huge chains of posts spawned by angry toots/posts. At this point I'm convinced that this is just a modality of failure in human discourse. I'm cautiously optimistic that humans will develop norms around socializing in the large, but it took centuries of political instability for the printing press to be normalized, so it may take (turbulent) decades for socializing in the large to be normalized.

At least on Twitter you can still switch to chronological feed (though default settings do probably influence people's behavior in general).

Asking for a friend, where do you find those usenet flamethread archives?

Narkive has a whole bunch of these archived (especially since Google Groups is terrible these days.) If you know which group you're looking for they have old logs. Some folks associated with the newly revived Big 8 are also looking to submit Usenet archives to archive.org.

You could say "enragement is good for engagement"

> t humans just aren't evolved to have some kinds of discussions asynchronously, remotely behind a screen

Evolution does not have an intended purpose.

> I've found myself needing to disconnect from social media because it leads me to having negative feelings about people that I know I like

That sounds a lot like heated face to face interactions. I guess that's why they call it "social" media!

People can take responsibility for their feelings and actions. Or they can find a scapegoat like social media. There's a long human tradition of scapegoating, after all.

> Evolution does not have an intended purpose.

I never said it did. What's your point? I'm just emphasizing that humans have clearly evolved to have social constraints in face-to-face interactions that haven't evolved in async, remote interactions (which is unsurprising).

> That sounds a lot like heated face to face interactions

Except it's not, and that's my whole point. Yes, of course people can have heated face-to-face interactions, but it's undeniable that people can be a lot nastier, quick to judge, be belligerent, etc. in remote interactions vs. in-person. And it's not just social media. Louis CK has a great bit about how he can be a total asshole when driving in traffic in a way that would be completely unacceptable/insane if he did it in an elevator, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8062QEFk5g . The same dynamic applies in online interactions.

This comment fails to account for the fact that communicating via software is different than communicating offline.

If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him. Such an outcome may be illiberal (it deprives the drunkard of his voice), but since it fulfills the wishes of the majority, it is highly democratic.

If a drunkard wanders onto social media and harasses everyone, what happens next depends on the design of the social media site.

Social media, like most online media, causes people to behave and to think differently than they would offline. There's a low limit to what we can correctly extrapolate about humanity in general from the behavior of humans on arbitrarily-designed social media websites.

> If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him.

Let me introduce you to Reddit.

Although on Reddit, you may be digitally removed for merely saying something unpopular.

A decade ago Reddit hosted all manner of offensive (and sometimes literally illegal) content. It's not human nature that changed; it's the design of Reddit that changed.

If we make generalizations about society using social media sites, we have to take into account that the design of a site, and the idiosyncrasies of online communication, foster unique kinds of behavior.

But Reddit is by far the best counterargument to all these articles. It not only has the effect of suppressing new viewpoints and arguments that might make the viewpoints a correct (or incorrect) one, but it also has the effect of fueling resentment/blame against the left-wing because people mainly interact with the left-wing of the internet on a daily basis and see the left wing suppressing their personal complaints, and Reddit may have had the unintended consequence of helping the right wing by making them a protest party. The moderation on the site has managed to turn the entire global redditsphere into a US left wing echochamber completely aloof from the localities being represented.

The article argues that the effect of social media is to weaken democracy. And the comment to which I responded, as I understand it, argues that social media, in itself, represents a flowering of democracy.

My own view is a variation of 'the medium is the message': that social media molds the world to suit itself.

Online platforms all have idiosyncrasies: one platform incentivizes performative behavior, another incentivizes flame-wars, a third leads users to misjudge the prevalence of some subculture in society, and so on.

So I agree with the article that social media is weakening democracy, in as much as we have designed social media sites stupidly. And I disagree with the comment to which I responded, insofar as, if social media represents a flowering of democracy, it represents democracy based on people who are effectively in an altered state of mind.

I don't know if flowering is the right word, that might be too rosy of a picture (sorry, bad pun).

I don't mean to attach a value judgement to direct democracy. If you asked me to, I'd agree that it's something thats doomed to fail.

I just find it ironic that an elite media institution makes the argument that something that ostensibly lets every person (all of the 'demos') voice their opinion is undermining "democracy".

I find it hard to explain the amusement that I get from this scenario... it's sort of like a double entendre. If you use the original literal meaning of the word democracy, the headline seems like an obvious contradiction (letting all the people speak is undermining rule by the people!). If you translate democracy to "our specific form of democracy" or just "our current system" then the effect goes away.

Of course a lot of this relies on social media being some perfect public forum, which it obviously isn't. I just saw some comedy to the situation is all.

I see some truth to that, but I tend to focus on all the possible versions of the internet we could have designed, probably some would be dystopic, and others utopic.

I also can see the irony in democracy falling to democracy, but, at the risk of sounding preachy, we should remember that the most infamous dictatorships of the 20th Century sprang from democratic elections.

Democracy leading to non-democracy isn't the irony i was talking about.

The irony is in an institution that has enormous power in our system complaining that giving the little people a chance to speak up is somehow undermining the ability of those little people to self-govern.

Edit: In other words, social media may not be perfectly representative of the people's will, but it's almost certainly more so than what comes out of something like the atlantic. On top of that, you could argue that social media diminishes the power of an institution like the atlantic. That is the irony.

Social media is what happens if you give everyone a microphone.

The mob mentality, fake news, conspiracy theories, and so forth were all big problems in the past. Until sometime in the 20th century, lots of newspapers published that kind of stuff too. It’s an unavoidable part of human nature.

People who want regulation of social media need to realize that they really desire a return to elite control of public discourse and want the microphone taken away from many of the people it has been given to. Maybe that is the correct position — but people making that argument should realize and admit that is the case.

> Social media is what happens if you give everyone a microphone.

Bullshit. Anyone can post, but how much their post actually gets shown to others is dependent on the algorithm. Everyone gets a microphone but the microphone manufacturer gets to decide how loud every microphone is.

Next you'll tell me the Letters to the Editor page in newspapers is a democratic space everyone has a microphone for because anyone can write in.

The real innovation here is being able to make people feel like they're in a "democratic" communication space when it's still a top down media space where what gets heard is controlled centrally.

Usenet, forums, etc were more real democratic spaces since anyone could just post, and it was up to individual readers to decide who to ignore. That said in practice, most successful communities usually had to have moderation to avoid being overrun in spam-- but this is a much more honest, gentle, and transparent sort of control than an algorithm that operates subtly, with the readers not even really realizing what other choices were ignored.

> Bullshit. Anyone can post, but how much their post actually gets shown to others is dependent on the algorithm. Everyone gets a microphone but the microphone manufacturer gets to decide how loud every microphone is.

Yes, and people like it, and we know that because they continue to engage with the content. If they didn't like the results of the algorithm they would not engage.

The algorithm does not shape people's preferences -- quite the opposite! It is an attempt to discover their preferences and cater to them in order to sell more advertisements. If the algorithm did not give people what they want, it wouldn't work, and social media companies would have to change it in order to chase the advertising dollars.

If there were two equivalent social networks, and one of them had algorithmically curated content and one of them just presented a straightforward chronological feed of posts, the vast majority of people would flock to the one that had the algorithm. The social network that did not have an algorithm would need to invent one in order to stay in business.

> Yes, and people like it

So? People like cocaine too.

> The algorithm does not shape people's preferences -- quite the opposite! It is an attempt to discover their preferences

Which preferences though? There might be a hundred different types of content that I hypothetically would find very engaging, but the system happens to pick one particular one of those somehow. Yes, it's subject to some constraint but there is still a lot of degree of freedom left over.

> but people making that argument should realize and admit that is the case

I personally do and I always find it a little bit funny that this is framed as so scandalous. How to elevate capable elites so they can govern responsibly and create some sense of regularity and order is one of the oldest and maybe the primary questions we've always dealt with. 'Let the inmates run the asylum' and don't dare question if they're qualified to do so is a fairly new experiment, with so far questionable results

I don't believe social media gives us a glimpse of democracy, but rather anarchy.

As for it being controlled by a privileged few I believe that part is true from my experience in the industry, and my experience with it in general. It's very, very easy to sock-puppet and there are maybe...3-4 companies who control ~80% of all "truth" that is out there. For example, the rise of so-called "fact-checkers" is largely due to the control needed on society. You can probably think of 10 examples where a fact checker would be useful, but who controls them? Who signs their paychecks? The same people who control the flow of information. If you want evidence of this one-sided control ask yourself what would happen if you were a normal joe nobody and google shut down your gmail account, or instagram, facebook, etc. You've completely lost your voice.

This fact that some company can be the arbiter of "truth" and information flow implies tyranny, rather than democracy. If the world was set up on mastodon I would be inclined to agree with you. However, in it's current state it feels more like a method to control people and not a method for so called "democratic" exchange. Control of the media is very important to governments exactly for the purpose of reducing democracy [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

> You've completely lost your voice

Well... that's true, but it's also the way things always were until very recently.

You start with:

> I don't believe social media gives us a glimpse of democracy, but rather anarchy.

But it seems like the conclusion you reach is that it's tyranny. Do you view anarchy and tyranny as the same thing? Or would you view them as opposites, or somewhere in between?

I read it as social media is anarchy and to try to censor it will become tyranny.

I don't believe so. I think the problem is the way social media platforms prioritize engagement above all else. They use clever algorithms to curate the content you scroll through to maximize time spent engaging with the platform.

This has a side effect of promoting fringe content, because it drives engagement. Even if the interaction is the user calling someone an idiot for thinking the Earth is flat, that is still engagement. It gets fed into the algorithm, and now that content gets recommended to more and more people.

Reddit is the only social media platform that I think actually resembles a direct democracy. It's algorithm is driven by the karma system, not engagement. Posts and comments that people mostly dislike or disagree with get hidden by their low karma scores even though they often have high engagement metrics for the few people who do see them. This direct democracy comes with it's own problems though, mainly in how it reinforces groupthink and the formation of echo chambers.

The idea that everyone has a voice is false on social media. The people whose posts tend to trend in culture are often not random people but established players offering an already entrenched perspective.

I would have agreed with your view 25 years ago, when everyone was making blogs instead of instagram profiles. But today what you assume is organic discussion on social media is entirely artificial, designed to limit the shades of acceptable opinion amongst the public in a manner not much different than old media has done (deferring to authority, pundits, established known variables).

This is a really interesting point. We’ve bought into the “American Dream” of social media— as long as what you’re saying is “good” enough or “interesting” enough, you too, can go viral. But the reality is the success is not nearly as organic as it seems.

Social media in its current form (ad-driven, VC-backed) is far from direct democracy. It's obscurely controlled by not elected persons working for large corporation, optimized by AI/ML algorithms for confrontation (a.k.a. "engagement") and ad revenue, not for social problem-solving. The current social media are simply designed for a different purpose.

I personally disagree with direct democracy unless it's extremely localized, and otherwise agree with representative democracy, like we have with governors, senators, and the electoral college. As Zizek once said, even if we had direct democracy, we would still have a situation where only a privileged few have the luxury of time, education, and understanding to be deeply involved in the political process, just like we do now. Except at least with representative democracy we can choose who those people are (and make them need re-elections), whereas in a fully direct democracy, I'd just have no say whatsoever if I didn't have the time to stay up to date with global economics, politics, news, culture, voting, etc.

Not to mention humans defer to 'representatives' anyway: local charismatics; implicit hierarchies at work, at the gym, school, etc; can even be anonymous, i.e. whatever ideology they purpose which they haven't carefully reflectd on for inconsistencies and aporias, etc

This is just the death throes of the legacy media losing their influence.

The Internet democratizes the spread of information and smartphones give easy access to all of it. Social media allows bloggers and podcasters to distribute information faster, cheaper, and to a much larger audience than the printing press, radio, or television could ever dream of.

It seems to me that since the rise of social media, politicians are voting in a way that's less representative of their constituents, not more. By that measure social media is bringing us farther from direct democracy, not closer.

> It seems to me that since the rise of social media, politicians are voting in a way that's less representative of their constituents, not more.

A consideration: Could it also be that the politicians are voting quite like before, it is just that social media made you much more aware of the fact that this voting behavior is not representative of the wishes of their voters?

How do you know it's because of social media?

I don't, but regardless the US doesn't seem very close to direct democracy to me. So I disagree with OP when they say we're getting a glimpse of what direct democracy looks like right now.

To clarify, I don't mean to say the US is looking like a direct democracy. I mean to say that maybe we can think of social media as a microcosm that shows what direct democracy might look like.

Topics going viral are sort of like issues coming up for a vote, and the result is that you see different consensuses emerge and different real world consequences (companies changing policies and making phony apologies for things, for example).

I would recommend "The Myth of the Rational Voter" which deals with this issue very systematically. Democracy is good for a lot of reasons, but that doesn't mean voters make the best choice for themselves every time. I think over time the system heals though. It has so far.

Yeah when it comes to detailed policy decisions, voters have a huge information disparity. This is why a solid trust in media is so critical to democracy: otherwise the situation devolves into a contest of persuasive personality.

idk, I feel like the opacity of social media allows for the more direct control of the zeitgeist from special interests. Propaganda can be given the paradoxical credibility of a "concerned citizen" through mass bot campaigns or not even bots, media specialists being paid to disseminate scripted opinions with just as much verisimilitude as posts from either you or me. We are all highly influenceable, and we are weak to this because we all believe we aren't.

No, because in actual social settings, human inherently promote views they find to be reputable, and minimize the impact of speech they believe to be dishonest and/or harmful.

Social media largely does the opposite, as a byproduct of optimizing purely for engagement

> Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like?

Only if unfettered direct democracy includes censorship of any comment that exists outside the official approved message. I would call social media an unfettered plutocracy.

It's unregulated and unstructured conversation in isolated information silos. Different groups of people are on different information streams. A particular conversation should be visible for the whole nation and the participants in that conversation should be chosen in a representative manner.

>with enough resources an individual can gain more votes

It's not just the usual resources, it's time. If you have lots of free time, you can make a name for yourself on social media. If you have to work and raise children, you can't engage as much. Guess who dominates the discussions?

News papers and anybody with a printing press used to hold that same power. So it seems like the same thing, just faster, and whatever else... but that might be a too simplistic perception, ignoring other factors... or perhaps not.

Or perhaps this shows that most of us aren't capable of or willing to think independently, and just trust whatever information presented to us?

Previously, the authority are more careful in presenting information. Now the social media just recommend whatever that can attract us to the platform, regardless of how ridiculous the information is.

> Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like?

If Cambridge Analytica is "a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like" , then yes. Social media is a mass controll platform.

Social media is dangerous, because the algorithms that make it money are milking negative emotions like outrage and hate.

Social media as "people interacring on the internet" is not bad per se. For example I'd guess Hacker News' net benefit for democracy would be positive.

Social bubbles dominated by extremists has nothing to do with control by a privileged few.

> Could it be that social media is giving us a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like?

If anything is giving us an example of how not to implement distributed/liquid democracy.

"social media is mostly controlled [and manipulated] by a privileged few" *additions mine

but, you could argue that it's always been that way. The scale has multiplied.

If you mean "direct democracy" by "technically democratic" then you have a point. But direct democracy is totally flawed and rightly no country endorses it. (To make this clear, Switzerland is not a direct democracy, they merely have more plebiscites than other countries.) Real direct democracy would lead to horrible populism, short-sighted and uninformed decision making, and a tyranny of the majority. It would also likely be hijacked in no time by taking over mass media, and turned into a real dictatorship. Representative democracy with minority protections and strong power divisions is way superior and what people mean by "democracy" (at least upon a bit of reflection). I don't see how social media could possibly make representative democracy more democratic. Since the posters who actually know what they're talking about will always be in a small minority, it's hard to see how social media could make voters more informed, for instance. Most posts on social media contain no new information at all, all the information in them is aggregated from traditional media in a usually extremely biased and selective manner. The vast majority of posters employ no journalists, have no correspondents, and do not gather any news of their own.

In my opinion, it's important to distinguish between different types of social media, though. Heavily moderated forum-based social media like Reddit and HN make it possible to have halfway civil discussions, although the amount of noise and misinformation can still be high. I personally consider them relatively neutral or only slightly negative for democracy. They are good for finding like-minded people interested in niche topics, which can be good or bad depending on the topic.

Social media like Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, seem to have no positive effect at all. Their rules of conduct basically enforce and select for passive aggressive posts and intellectual insults. It's unbearable for everyone involved and merely makes everyone more aggressive until they have customized their feeds so much that they create echo chambers. Such social media systems polarize a lot, even more so than traditional media.

> in other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic

That pure popular democracy per se doesn’t work was well known when our republic was founded. That knowledge, drawn from antiquity and refreshed over millennia, has been edited out of our culture’s diet over the past century. (In part because in fascism and totalitarianism we saw its opposite noxiously close.) A perusing of the Federalist Papers [0] is quick refreshment, however, and it’s shockingly topical to this day.

Unfettered democracy is a ship with untethered cargo. Once the crowd starts oscillating it self amplifies, careening into majoritarian tyranny (often punctuated by hyper partisan deadlock). This happens [1]. Every [2]. Single [3]. Time [4].

In small groups we intuitively know this, and thoughtlessly deploy troves of customs and manners reinforced from childhood and in part hard coded (e.g. our sense of fairness [5]). We make allowances for those whose interests are repeatedly, but reasonably, in the minority. And we tell jerks to shut the hell up, and if they don’t, stop inviting them. In large groups, none of that comes naturally. It needs to be codified. Particularly when customs and norms vary across people, regions and time.

Yet we somehow are led to believe that no, if we just did this or that with elections, the law of large numbers ensures rationality, and the madness that would ensue at a dinner party unconstrained by manners, norms, laws or empathy is somehow chased off by the garlic of popular consent. (In case it isn’t clear, I don’t believe in legitimate government without democratic elections. I love democracy. But more popular control isn’t boundlessly good. You don’t rest your case after showing X is more democratic than Y. If you love democracy, you should want it to thrive; for it to thrive, we must tend to it.)

[0] https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Titia

[3] https://www.juridicainternational.eu/index.php?id=15331

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baby-justice/

It’s even worse than a direct democracy because we know there is a portion the social media “crowd” who aren’t actually constituents. So it’s like a direct democracy where the democracy’s enemies are also allowed a vote.

In a democracy, you only get the one vote, but in social media, you can have thousands or millions

With lobbying and money as protected speech can have thousands or millions worth of influence without social media.

No. People are not themselves online and I assume that more people use social media than vote.

>But social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation

Me and Elon Musk both have "a voice" but one reaches much farther than the other. It's like saying capitalism is true democracy because everyone can vote with their wallet. Or as a farm animal once put it "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others"

People like Elon have an expanded reach due to their huge number of followers, but the neat thing about social media is that there are a lot of normal people who can also get a bunch of followers.

People like Hasan, Destiny, or Popehat have a pretty much unprecedented amount of reach for "normal people".

> social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation

This is demonstrably false, as illustrated by the spate of silencing dissenting voices on various platforms, regardless of whether their content is factual. Just today even, you can no longer talk about how the Biden admin has redefined the word "recession", without Facebook removing your post. They claim it's not factual, when it clearly is. But is it dissenting from what the "privileged few" want the masses to believe, so it is silenced. There's literally a new example of this each and every day.

No. People are not themselves online.

It would be that way if not for the bad actors, manipulators, misinformation, advertising and algos that place engagement over all else.

Too much going on behind the scenes for it to actually be democracy.

Interesting take, in a way it resembles direct democracy, but I don't think it qualifies since votes are meaningless in terms of what substantive power you gain from votes. Just because you have the right to speak your mind and have other people hear you does not mean you have any power over the direction of the platform or any additional agency. You can say (almost) whatever you want on the platform, but Facebook is still the arbiter of what speech is allowed on the platform and can ban you at any time, and as a user you are still nothing more than raw materials to them while they seek to monopolize your attention and energy.

The same goes outside of Facebook too for Americans, we can speak our minds but our political rights are being taken away because they inconvenience wealthy and powerful people. Without other freedoms, like freedom over your body, freedom from corporations abusing you by breaking the law and suffering no consequences, the right to vote, the Fourth Amendment, etc, freedom of speech is pretty empty on its own.

Direct democracy can have problems like you're describing, but I don't think it's the issue here. Rather it's exposing the fundamental issues of late capitalism that fails to meet human needs (healthcare, housing, belonging/emotional needs), compounded with unchecked corporate power which is increasingly resembling fascism. In fact, at this point most of the major tech companies (Google, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) are hiring many people from intelligence services. Corporate power merging with government power, especially by corporations hiring government spies, is a huge red flag for fascism taking hold. Before questioning democracy (which is a trend I've seen lately, as if to normalize democratic backsliding), I think we should start questioning that first.

- https://mronline.org/2021/06/14/jessica-ashooh-the-taming-of...

- https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...

- https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin...

- https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tikto...

Are you kidding? With the incredible censorship exercised by the social media giants, you think we have unfettered voices?

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