Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy

I agree the world was better with chronological feeds.

But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.

So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.

When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.

I would say that the ability for plausible-looking online personas to infiltrate and influence people's thought processes is the root of what plagues use, and a chronological feed wouldn't fix that!

People claim they want chronological feeds but hardly anyone actually does. With a chronological algorithm that incentivizes users to post slop more often to get noticed. In reality most social media users want priority given to major life events. Like if I haven't logged in to Facebook in a few days I'd prefer to see the announcement that my second cousin in Italy just had a baby prioritized at the top of the feed, ahead of the picture of what my neighbor cooked for lunch.

I think we want algorithmic feeds, we just want humane ones instead of adversarial ones. Give me a feed that prioritizes close friends and family first, important milestones over trivialities, impactful news over ragebait. Give me a highly curated version of Reddit with HN quality moderation. Most people would be very happy with that, but it runs counter to the advertising incentives and engagement metrics which drive the industry.

Yes, recommendation systems are (most of) the root.

But chronological feeds don't solve it (plenty of research on this).

Recommender systems that don't optimize for division are a more meaningful solution, ala https://bridging.systems/ (lots of work by others too).

This, e.g., bridging-based ranking, is same approach that underlies Community Notes.

To be honest, I think this is looking for an easy villain to blame to avoid asking the hard questions about social media. I remember when 10-15 years ago everyone was sure the problem was pseudonymity; they said "make people attach their real names to their comments and Greater Internet Fuckwad Syndrome will go away". We mostly lost pseudonymity--Facebook forces real names and a bunch of people on Xitter use them even though they don't need to--and it didn't help one bit: turns out people are perfectly happy to be toxic under their real identity.

"Get rid of algorithmic feeds" strikes me as similarly wishful thinking.

The medium causes the type of message.

The feed is root of the problem.

The feed is an integral part of social media.

We’re allowing them—companies, states, whoever—to feed us individually-targeted generated propaganda.

Mailing lists were and are fine. The algorithmic feed took over because it’s more addictive, simple as.

Optimising for engagement, centralised controls, pervasive data collection and mining, and addictive design need to go as well. Might be easier to ban the entire thing and let us get back to blogs.

Yeah, I agree: social media is great. Commoditized, commercialized social media, not so great.

Never forget, folks: we can all go back to mailman and phpBB, or the modern equivalent, at any point in time. Many of us do! There are still wonderful subject-driven forums out there, not quite inundated by the dreaded "&fbid disease"...

No, social media categorically bad. Even with no recommendations, it lets insane people form communities. It poisons kids’ minds. Especially with regard to kids, it moves all social discourse to the online space and sort of makes it mandatory that everyone is “opted in” because otherwise you get left out which is social suicide during your formative years. A social media ban is not a panacea though. Smart phones themselves should be banned for anyone under 18.

The medium, as a place of social and political discussion, has a fundamental flaw in favoring people with more free time. Even if scoring doesn't exist, nothing stops people from just submitting more posts and comments.

We can take a field trip back to Fark to observe a forum that has always kept chronological sorting as its defaults. I peer in every now and then, and it doesn't seem like the discussions are any less fraught or the people are happier.

"I miss chronological feeds."

In some jurisdictions, e.g., under the Settlement Agreement in the recent US "addiction" litigation against Meta, they will be available but only for teens

Why not make it an option for everybody

>The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction.

I agree, but it's not something exclusive to social platforms. Traditional media do this too, albeit in slightly different technical form. Today there are just too much information offered for consumption, so almost everyone who exploits our attention is incentivized to be manipulative.

> It was very telling when X started showing people’s locations and a lot of the political accounts targeting the US were based in other countries.

One thing to consider is if there were no social media would these attempts to subvert democracy stop ?

There are always elements in news media, academia, industry etc who are pawns in hands of foreign powers with ulterior motives.

> printed out millions of leaflets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_New_Zealand_election_fund...

Perhaps funded by USA fundies. A million dollars is a lot of influence in New Zealand elections.

They directly funded people and organizations that are sympathetic to them.

They still do and so does the USA.

"bot" accounts are really only one piece of an influence campaign. They're there to make it seem like a large number of people agree with a talking point and to provide more ways that someone might get caught up in that influence network. A lot of "bots" are real people that have just been entrained by an influence campaign, useful idiots. You still need other individuals that specialize in creating or rewording the talking points to appeal to various audiences and still others to be the "trusted face" or parasocial relationship i.e. influencer.

The target in an influence campaign is not really the individual voter. It's much more effective to convert someone who already has mass appeal and influence. You often can't get to these people directly but you can reach them by making your cause seem popular/justified/righteous/countercultural/cool/sophisticated or whatever else appeals to the people you're trying to influence.

You don't feel like discussion on Facebook is subject to gatekeeping?

I think a lot of the issue is that in local communities a lot of what would have been direct local discussion has moved on-line, and is manipulated for "engagement".

Where do you find social media that is like that? The big social media places are full of gate keepers.

yea, i agree. the internet has provided the freest form of communication ever. im very suspicious of those who invoke "democracy" in an attempt to control it.

I knew as usual on HN the most logical and accurate comment would be at the problem and greyed out.

If the people are too stupid to navigate democracy while reading, seeing and hearing what other people say online, even malicious actors/disinformation etc then they shouldn't be allowed to vote.

>generally don't want to say that because it contradicts their ideology or it just plain looks bad, so they resort to an alternative argument: "stupid people should be allowed to vote but the information that they have access to should be controlled by us instead of by the Bad People"

Its objectively true that people are voting based off false information. It makes sense that people would want that to stop.

But people aren't communicating freely. They are being throttled, shadow banned, refused etc. In some cases these are political candidates. Since this is one of the main channels of consumption these obvious and well documented manipulations are having a massive impact on political outcomes.

By what metric has it worked well?

As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".

It's hardly the "freely communicating" part that's harming democracy. I find it hard to believe you're making this argument in good faith.

> If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy

That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.

Yes BUT nobody took anything on any of those platforms seriously. It was commonly agreed on at the time that the internet was for bullshit and bullshitting, and people reacted accordingly. The problems online didn't start in earnest until a bunch of people were convinced to pretend, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that online spaces were a real thing where Important Stuff happened.

What do you make of the “eternal September” explanation of the shift away from the internet you describe? I wasn’t alive for it

Sure, but it's become a major issue with social media too because of the ease and ability to amplify things that aren't even something major or regional media would cover and profitable media still has some incentive to not be completely inaccurate because of liability. Now you can have the dumbest people with no concern for liability, because they own nothing and don't really have any source of income, making factually inaccurate AI assisted posts, videos, images, etc that inflame the general public who do no verification or fact checking.

Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.

Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.

It's also not democracy, and never has been (with rare exceptions).

Social network -> social media -> media

Was reality tv the start of it? People get to turn their brains off to watch the stories media companies want to tell. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t correlated with the decline of the American presidential debates.

I don't think reality TV was ever that big of a phenomenon in most of the world. It's a very American type of show, tbh.

a hallmark of fascism and dictatorships is the capture of media, and the censorship of it.

i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.

Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.

Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.

The stability of autocracy is greatly exaggerated. It often can't even withstand the leader dying. Government stability is the great feature of democracy. I'm not quite as confident as I used to be, but I'm still pretty confident that my country will have a new leader in 2029 and that there will not be a violent civil war accompanying the transition.

People saying "fake news always existed" are trying to explain that the quantity of it is not so different as many modern commentaries seem to think. 25 years ago, the kind people Tweeting about how protests are satanic weren't stewing in impotence, they were writing church leaflets about how Pokemon and the New World Order were satanic.

20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.

the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.

What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.

and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.

No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.

I think that removes agency and responsibility from the public.

The truth is that people like outrage and outrageous content.

Boring, even handed content does not get engagement.

We have to call out human nature to be able to reckon with it.