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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

Bottom line is: it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience, especially when social media has such potential to sow chaos and instability.

Look at how the US internet fuelled the fires of the Arab Spring / HK protests / Jan 6th / Any number of colour revolutions in Europe. Even today, we see X being used as a platform to encourage protests against governments in UK and Germany. National sovereignty is contingent on digital sovereignty - everyone is going to need a firewall.

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> it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience

It's reasonable for governments that don't entertain the notion that their citizens have freedoms of association, speech, etc. For countries where those concepts are legally enshrined in the country's own founding documents, no, it's not. Part of living in a democracy is having the responsibility to inform yourself and make voting decisions based on your own understanding. Letting the government tell people who they can and cannot listen to flies in the face of the very idea of democracy.

Yet democracy was created in a time without the ability to influence millions of people, in ways that exploit the wiring of our brains, in mere seconds, at once. We cannot pretend that people will act as sovereign entities with the nation's best interests in mind, when they're not making fully informed decisions, but misinformation and propaganda instead.

Giving an enemy a direct medium to feed information to your constituents at will is just a bad move, and no amount of free speech will change that.

it's over for this form democracy. How can it survive when foreign powers can influence elections with one update of an algorithm? A document written 200 years ago does not protect against the communication media we have today. I wish it were different, but we do not have the luxury of abstraction I am afraid

i agree that this is the logical conclusion of the Democrat’s handwringing about foreign interference in the election, but I think the notion that Russian interference actually decided the 2016 election is absurd and there has never been any evidence that it did so

> Letting the government tell people who they can and cannot listen to flies in the face of the very idea of democracy.

But that's not what this is doing.

People are still free to hear the same thing on other platforms (which they can considering how much is crossposted).

It's like getting rid of AM radio because you want to use the spectrum and claiming it violates freedom of speech because stations have to close down.

Exactly.

And anyone is free to fly to China and have conversations.

Or read the state-run media from China.

These free speech arguments seem to have the prior that TicTok is literally the only communications channel.

is there any way i could get a “real adult” pass or something like it so those in charge can treat me like an actually intelligent human being?

“we should restrict the information environment because the masses can’t handle it and it causes chaos and instability” is the exact same argument that well-educated Chinese use for why their country can’t be a democracy.

I see so many people arguing against the effectiveness of propaganda as if they think an opinion is arrived at deterministically with the same access to facts. Utterly insane.

Did I say this? No.

I don’t care how effective propaganda is, I am in a liberal democratic society and should be able to read what I want. Outcome-based reasoning for why I should have my reading restricted so I vote for the apriori correct things is entirely illiberal and anti-democratic.

J.S. Mill decided these arguments over 150 years ago and the arguments since have not gotten more compelling.

It seems you are being downvoted, but I see this similarly. Elon musk applying pressure in German elections or UK politics via X/Twitter is basically exactly the problem with foreign interests controlling your social media; so I kinda hope the ban does set an example for other countries.

Maybe, once the inflammatory platforms like X & Facebook are banned in the EU, then we can also get a social network that is not fueled by VC growth and engagement metrics; but can be run by a nonprofit or something. A man can dream.

I think EU will not ban these platforms but mired them down with never ending stream of lawsuits, and eventually force a withdrawal - similar to how some US companies don't serve EU due to GDPR etc. A proper firewall should create the space for domestic services to re-emerge - and yes, we have a chance that these could be democratic from ground up. Lets hope so.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have been putting their heads so far up into Trump's rear they are probably looking out of his mouth by now. There is absolutely zero chance for actual democratic systems to emerge in a country where the top 1% own 35% of literally everything there is to own, cronies in the government, and apex corporations mended to the will of an 80 year old convicted felon

yes i think it kind of looks that way I am afraid. US literally has an oligarch duly elected and assuming office in a few hours. We are in the era of robber barons, maybe similar to late 19th Century America, where J P Morgan was obviously the only man who mattered, despite the performative democracy.

I hope one day these platforms are governed by the people using them. "Users" are humans who have little voice in the decision making of their digital nations.

What are you talking about? X introduced this fantastic feature called Community Notes that allows users to collaboratively add context and fact-checks to potentially misleading posts. It relies on a crowdsourced system where contributors can write notes that are displayed if they receive enough support from users with diverse perspectives. And Meta recently announced that it is planning on introducing a similar feature.

Yes i think thats great. Does it give users a way to make decisions on how algorithms are used? On what the platform is called? On when someone should be banned? What should be penalties for breaking the rules? For writing any of the rules?

Just because we can have fact-checking doesn't mean we get to participate in the decision making process. A news station in a country is not the same as voting or having representation in legislation.

>Elon musk applying pressure in German elections

That doing an interview with a controversial politician is "applying pressure" and is seen as "a danger to democracy" (quoting German media) is all you need to know about the German media landscape and German politics.

>but can be run by a nonprofit or something

There are high profile celebs on German "state" television unironically being in favor of a state-run social network.

Pandora's box is open. For an in depth take on the subject, check out "The Revolt of the Public".

TL;DR Communication technology has changed the relationship between rulers and the ruled, and we are just beginning to see what that might mean for the future of civilization. The book promises a lot but doesn't quite deliver. Still interesting reading.

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