The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
science.org
science.org
It’s definitely not explicitly stated though.
Having identified the true root of the problem, I would recommend directing resources towards dismantling advertising. Focusing on anything else is wasted effort.
Also, capitalism doesn't need perpetual growth either (anymore than other system, that is). Independent and worker-owned media are still facets of capitalism, for starters.
That sounds self-contradicting. How do you define «sustainability» in that case?
If you take «growth» to be defined as d(something)/dt>0, I’d posit that any equilibrium by definition has zero net growth, whether it’s a static or dynamic equilibrium.
That said, in long run, there's both a tendency for most growth to fall and for basically nothing to be sustainable.
We can stop any time, now. Money was already a satisfactory root cause.
This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neutral, but it generally limited how “out there” stuff could be especially since you need a fairly broad audience and everyone had to see the same things.
With social media everyone can choose their own adventure, and create their own alternate realities, and that doesn’t prevent the social media companies from scaling.
As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds)
So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)
isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?
Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.
I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.
Statistics say the opposite: left leaning persons in the US have a broader spectrum of media they consume and trust. From the selection of ~30 media presented, people on the right basically chose 1: Fox News https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-...
err not necessarily, mass media like the printing press, radio, television, the internet etc just increases visibility and expands people's understanding of the world, the risk to democracy is destabilizing economic conditions (extreme inequality). Social media just exacerbates this.
A problem for whom? If a form of government requires someone, somewhere, to prevent people talking to each other, this form of government is illegitimate. Period. The end.
What is even the purpose of a government if not to guarantee the rights of its people?
It wasn't long ago that the Twitter shoe was on the other foot, and many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will (with no hint of irony regarding their alleged ideological views on private companies)
The thing is, sometimes the decisions of (other) democratic countries can be pretty braindead. The UK and its age verification nonsense, Spain and its holy crusade against La Liga stream pirates, the US and anything to do with abortions/LGBT/Black people/whatever the book ban lunatics are trying to push today, Germany's infamous "Pimmelgate" and "Mehrzweckeier" scandals...
Suddenly, the question really is, whose laws to follow to what degree.
It can also mean highly influential support for ideologies I don't like - like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism.
> many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will
A few years ago, bog-standard content moderation was limiting the reach of enormously+reasonably unpopular ideologies like fascism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism. Groups who were profoundly unhappy with these limits would bullhorn complaints of intentional suppression and censorship.
With the release of the Twitter Files (which exposed content moderation), it became clear that many folks were unable to differentiate between actual, long-established content moderation methods and actual directed suppression and censorship.¹
This deep misinterpretation seemed to flow from the ignorance of what content moderation looks like at scale. That core misunderstanding was often amplified and made worse when historically-moderated individuals filled in that vacuum with their long standing preconceptions.
The upshot are today's efforts to raise the visibility of far-right viewpoints thru coordinated crafted messaging² and thru actual suppression of non-right viewpoints thru new controls over platforms and thru often unaccountable misuse of governmental powers.
Our present conditions seem to well reflect and align with the article author's analysis.
My take is leftist (and I don't mean American liberal), anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, anti-genocide, and I don't think there's any difference of motivation and intention in the US. The "bad" group voters (D or R) feel they're protecting the poor, the kids, the families, etc., while the other was attempting to undermine democracy.
To talk only of speech, the Democrats were in charge when the demonisation and criminalisation of anti-genocide protests started in earnest, they were in charge when TikTok was banned for Israel, they were enthusiastically in charge when cancelling/censoring/fining for "hate-speech" (== whatever the gov wants it to be) became a legal gray area (and was then adopted by liberals the world over, see UK). Every other problem the Rs are criticised for (war, corruption, poverty, genocide!!!) was started/facilitated/ignored by the Ds, but people forget it instantly. Except, of course, paying lip service to identity politics.
I have no reason to believe the world would have been much different today had Democrats stayed in power. Look at how the "leftest" Dems vote. Actually, criticising the US as a leftist would have been harder: you'd be instantly viewed as a Nazi.
Both groups are sides of the same coin when it comes to keeping power and subjugating others to it, more or less violently.
Edit: to avoid posting empty criticism, what I mean is that to find a left party, or a party actually attempting to make life better for the poor and disenfranchised and not wanting to kill those who happen to be located near oil and Israel, you have to look away from the Rs and the Ds.
https://www.9news.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/weld-c...
as evidence of that. I think now they feel like they're just responding in kind.
broadband reduced civic participation, eroded social trust, and boosted voting for extreme-right and populist parties in Italy and Germany.
Is the "extreme-right" party in Germany still chaired by a brown lesbian woman?
I dont care about social media algorithms, as far as I am concerned its settled that they suck. Its also not "The architecture of the internet" in any way shape or form.
And the OP article specifically says "Architecture". The architecture of a building is not a seat at a table inside the building, even if the building contains it.
And, sometimes, the architect of a building also designs the furniture and other equipment. Oscar Niemeyer’s headquarters of the French Communist Party is a great example of that, where the architect went on to design the building’siconic chairs.
I'm not using anything too esoteric (Firefox Developer Edition, highly tweaked + extensions).
Because of this, Windows, MacOS, Linux, are all insecure by design.
Because of that, you can't really host your own servers on the internet, unless you're a die-hard IT guy.
Because of that, the only game in town is walled gardens.
Because of that, everything has to be paid for, thus the algorithm, thus the rot of society.
All because we thought Unix's security model was good enough.
All this morning, a thread has been building in my mind. On Twitter, you read something, and a witty come-back denying yet affirming part of the original post, and feel tempted, strongly tempted, to try to add to that cascade. It's the structure of Twitter, really.
Here on HN, we try to do the same, but at least we're working with higher quality resources. The problem is that you can't weave a thread together without having to expend thousands of words to replace what should be something much simpler, using a few transclusions, to provide examples of what you mean, something much more information dense, and far less verbose.
Thus, it's much easier to just try to demolish something, by pointing out its most visible flaw, in a few sentences, rather that to build up a novel observation, by crudely trying to provide context with thousands of words.
The algos optimize for engagement, which can roughly translate into the people drive the algos, as they would stop watching or visiting or commenting, if it was not something they wanted to engage in.
So in some ways, is this not democracy to the max?
I wonder if articles like these don’t like the outcomes, or the reflection of society that the algos create. And thus attack them, because they would rather curate and limit conversation and expressions on the internet they don’t like or agree with.
Now it is mis-informed voters.
Couldn’t have said it better myself
Because if you are right it’s a loosing battle. The masses will always be under informed, and under educated. And the only way to inform and educate them would result very undemocratic society.
This has been raised for decades, if not centuries.
The problem is that what is or isn't considered an educated view is /heavily/ dependent on... the political bent of the person(s) articulating the view, and the person(s) making the determination.
What's worse is that "fringe" views can often lead us to something that has previously been overlooked.
Finally - Australia has 100% compulsory voting - everyone must vote in elections, else receive a fine. That's intended to be sure that everyone is involved in providing their opinion on how the political body that's being voted on is an accurate reflection of the people being governed. What it doesn't do is force people to care, and a phenomena known as a "Donkey vote" occurs.
You can force people to attend classes educating them on civics, but you cannot force them to absorb, or even care, because, for a lot of people, politics is so repulsive - all they see is people squabbling about abstract ideas that the voters have next to no understanding how, or even if, it will affect them.
Would you trust that power in Trump's hands? If so, would you have trusted it in Biden's?
"Keep it from getting into the wrong hands, forever" is not a workable plan. The correct plan is "the government doesn't get that power".
That is not what I said. They might still care, but the point is that the elections should not be hijacked by one topic (this is not in the interest of those voters, but since they are uninformed, what do they know?) I hope that clears it up.
Many people seem to want democracy, but only if the public votes in the way that is acceptable to them. That’s not democracy! That’s rubber stamp technocracy!
Well, many people claim they want democracy, due to how our modern political discourse is shaped. But the amount of arguments of essentially "of course you can have any opinion, as long as it's the correct one" I've seen is quite astonishing.
pick one:
- stupid people vote without understanding what they vote for
- stupid people don't vote, but it's not a democracy anymore
Populism is inherent in the whole set up and always has been.
That's what we're told, anyways
It isn't too unreasonable to think about that there might be an invisible thumb on the scales for any of these algorithms
Edit: Grammar.
These social media sites could be designed for consensus-building and we would see very different outcomes for society.
It's not hypocritical to want the democracy that works instead of the one that self-disintegrates.
Perhaps the solution is to lean further into fractionalization, but in a peaceful and constructive way. That might mean the destruction of democracy, but I think this just points to democracy not being a good inclusive system to begin with.
And having to listen to disgruntled losers, political opportunists, and garden-variety edgelords is democracy in practice. I do agree with you that foreign adversaries are a huge issue with democracy, with regard to the internet specifically.
Classical liberalism requires certain rights and protections to every member of society in ways they could be perceived as “anti democratic” if for example a minority group is widely hated.
Generally speaking all of this requires some level of rules and forbearance, and a political “playing field” where disputes can be ironed out.
Part of what is required for this to work is a shared epistemology. This has historically been provided by journalist and academic elites, but it the thing that is being eroded by social media.
The problem is now everyone can choose their own reality, but that reality may just be completely not true. This was a well known phenomenon on the right but it’s happening a lot more on the left as well, with it being taken as a fact that everyone in the US is poor and struggling even though that is not true at all.
The net effect of this is that “charismatic” reactionary parties that are detached from reality perform better, because memeing wins elections better than doing things for constituents. The link was always a bit tenuous but now it’s completely broken and we’re seeing the rise of anti intellectual parties everywhere.
(1) directly fund studies and reproductions of studies (promising ahead of time to publish the results, even if negative) targeting the exact issues they're concerned about
(2) writing and publishing extensively to show people the results and help them arrive at a correct interpretation of the data
(3) make a public commitment ahead of time to change opinion based on what the data says, and not to overstate underdetermined theses
... instead of spending money trying to control the political narrative?
That would simply be science doing science -- which has always threatened the establishment because it's accountable to reality, not authority.
Science rightly done never claims authority, just reports on what the data says. Truth is powerful enough on its own.
1. There was no algorithm tweaking your feed. Promoting something and suppressing something else.
2. Creators were not paid.
3. Advertisements were randomly allocated irrespective of the content.
4. There were no such thing as likes.
5. Users had the option to pay for an ad-free experience.
I like to think that I am not alone in this and this happened to hundreds of thousands of people. When you overly optimize for engagement at some point you cause burnout and loss of interest. It felt funny seeing musk claim that all twitter statistics were going up without realizing the cost of it. Social media has to strike a very strong balance to keep you engaged, but not too engaged.
Besides, even if it was just about twitter, it can only take a small portion of the population to swing an election. Word of mouth is also downstream from twitter. People might not see something on twitter, but they might hear it from someone who saw it there.
If you believe Biden’s election was stolen, you are likely to have that belief reinforced by low-quality media targeted at you.
Modern smartphones could easily be meshnet nodes, but they don't really support P2P networking.
See: FireChat, Bitchat (removed from the Chinese app store), Airdrop (Apple limited its functionality in China)
Just call your opponents anti-democratic, extremist or polarising and here you go. Democracy!
1) Hand-wringing about information disintermediation: previously, institutional gatekeepers filtered information and interpreted it for the public. Now, the public sees raw information and forms its own judgements.
2) Social media has cut revenue streams for the sorts of organizations that bleat non-stop about how social media is a thread.
3) Weakening of ability of the institutional class to censor defectors and promulgators of inconvenient facts, which disaffected former censors call "disinformation".
Far from being a threat to "democracy", the internet is the best thing that's ever happened to it. Social media and the internet more broadly have enabled an unprecedented increase in breadth and depth of public participation in the marketplace of ideas. Those who don't like the result never liked democracy.
It's exhausting, this ceaseless cacophony of high-minded bullshit. I'm sick and tired of hearing people exclaim that the internet is a danger to "democracy" when, really, the problem is that the internet produces democratic outcomes they don't like.
I mean is the information raw really? How raw was #metoo or would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. The internet is super-curated. There’s like super obscure intellectual woke all over x/twitter; The opposite of raw, that’s what people like about it! Raw would be a _substantial_ improvement over the like bizarrely curated shit we have everywhere now.
“Nature was, and is, a commercial enterprise, owned by the privately held company Macmillian publishers. . .”
Get off the Internet, go read a book. “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Science Shook the Scientific World” - Eugene Samuel Reich.
The bullshit artists are at it again.