YouTube creators are going to be upset by this, political ads in election years have a CPM of upwards of $5. It makes up a lot of their income.
To provide tools that counter pressures toward tyranny.
> If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?
The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.
Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes.
What is the instrument for measuring societal good? And what is the mechanism for acting upon those measurements? My naive understanding is that in a society that purports to be democratic, societal good is expressed through votes (people vote for things they deem to be good, or for people who promise to bring those things about), and the enactment of those measurements is done through the same mechanism.
> Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes. Now we need a mechanism that establishes the goodness of faith of the informer. And if the past five or so years have taught me anything it is that barely anyone who plays professional-league politics speaks in good faith.
If the premise is that the mindset of citizens is so easily controllable that a foreign entity can do it, then why is a foreign entity's control of citizens' mindset any worse than domestic entity's control of the same? If people have no protection against the control of their mindset, then does it not follow that their minds will be controlled by _some_ entity? Isn't the game already lost at that point? And are we really discussing whom we would rather surrender our minds to?
But in a presumably democratic society, I would have thought, people would need convincing to submit to this claim.
If you think people are voting "squarely against their own interests," then you probably don't understand their interests.
While no candidate/party is ever a perfect fit, and everyone needs to make at least some compromises, exactly what compromises an individual voter makes is their completely valid choice.
And honestly, lectures about how XYZ represents the voter's interest and they must vote for that candidate otherwise they're somehow "doing it wrong" is itself a class of "feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests."
When people talk about voters voting against their own interests I don't think they usually mean voters who know what each candidate's policies would do for their issues and vote for the candidate who will give them the best overall outcome given that all of the candidates would go against some of their interests.
I think they are usually talking about the voters who don't actually know what a candidate's policies would do for their issues because they have been bombarded with misleading or outright lying ads from other candidates or from PACs or other organizations.
For example in a US Senate race here a couple of years ago I saw a lot of ads from the non-incumbent all focusing on problems of the largest city in the state. The thing is none of these problems had anything to do with the incumbent Senator, nor were they problems that the challenger would be able to do anything about if they won. If the challenger wanted to actually address those problems she should have been running for mayor or city council.
I've met several people who voted for that challenger because they wanted those city issues addressed. They knew she should be bad for other issues they cared about. So they thought they were compromising by giving up those other issues to get a better result on the city issues they cared about.
But since the challenger would not have been able to do anything about those issues but would be able to do harm for the issues they cared about they ended up voting for a candidate that was not better than the incumbent on any issue they cared about and was worse on several.