We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
"This is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause." feels more grounded in reality.
We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
"This is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause." feels more grounded in reality.
Peak free information flow was in 2010. When "social" media had its big break through, and nobody had learned how to control it yet. That time gave us the occupy movement, the Arab spring, and lots of hacktivism for the social good (mostly under the Anonymous umbrella).
Then the counter movement happened. And let's just say by 2016 social media was firmly under control and became a force against the people
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.
Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest. (from S2 Andor)
The loss of objectivity is one of the greatest losses. People who are online to want their trench to “win” are advocates for loss. People who abuse their position to only proclaim their side is the best, the all-knowing, the superior, or whatever the flavor is of the day, are advocates for loss.
And as we have seen, we are losing a lot by losing objectivity.
Yeah. I was saying "twitter gives you a revolution whether you need one or not". It's not automatic that the revolution will be progressive. And in the case of the Arab Spring, a liberal revolution gave rise to elections which brought in a much less liberal government, which is why the whole thing collapsed in short order.
But social media is also uniquely good at developing "negative polarization". Some of the counter movement was organic simply because people hated the progressive wins they saw.
> We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
We have an abundance of allowed information today, there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information. Social media censoring, takedown requests, shadow banning, government censoring.
We went from restricting the sharing of information to making information sharing unpopular.
If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.
If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.
Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
You pretty much described why I quit “social” media wholesale. It’s a turf war and nothing goods comes from it that cannot be got elsewhere at a vastly higher quality.
> If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
Isn't this basically just a form of forced compliance ? I agree it's happening, but its happening because the ideas/information is not beneficial for the one who can control the distribution. Before anyone could post on usenet, add their own tinfoil hat blog if they wanted, but take the UK for now, if there is any discussion or interaction with people on your website, the government wants your ID and your users'. It's exhausting.
This is essentially how das kapital got discredited in the public consciousness.
If you browse any CS career forum though, at least 60% of the complaints about "the industry" happen in most capitalist industries and typically have one or more corresponding chapters in das kapital (e.g. one of the various forms of alienation, treadmill effect, capital accumulation, the creation of a reserve army of labour).
>there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information
I don't think it sounds true. Pre-internet, information distribution required access to specific technical tools, and physical transportation efforts. As one of USSR dissidents noted, risks of distribution grew almost exponentially with amount of pages (and it's about imprisonment, not account deletion). For comparison, emailing so far works even in very repressive countries. And even narrowing the issue to the West, while free speech suffered a lot recently, shadowbanned account is probably still works better than hectograph.
> there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information.
There's an endless source of information if you look for it. Just because social media doesn't stuff them in your face doesn't mean they're censored.
On the other hand, you can shove proof in people's faces and they'll still find reasons to argue against it. Information availability is not the problem. It's more energy consuming to search and filter information so people largely avoid doing it.
There's a trope in movies where the antagonist is secretly recorded and broadcast so regular people finally see the truth and wake up. I've seen journalists risking their carriers to expose corruption only for people to shrug and look the other way.
Do we, or are a lot of people who may or may not be on the side of tyranny doing a lot of work to control how the information actually flows.
Not entirely true. Many science is gatekeeped, as well as other types of information. May books require illegal services to be obtained, or money (when available). Information about facts is buried in a lot of misinformation. Free flow is very hard to obtain!
We have peak flow of propaganda and disinformation to a cartoonish level.
Unfortunately we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack on information consumption.
It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale.
Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not have sufficient motivation. Often the motivation to do the opposite is stronger.
> Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary?
_Most_ developed countries do invest in the education and teaching of critical thinking. It's not even that expensive.
In most countries, if a political party prefers an uneducated voter base, they don't win elections. Or if they do, there are enough working checks and balances (and parties in the opposition) to prevent serious harm.
> we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack
Umm, wouldn't a simple solution be going back to linear news feed that only includes updates from people you follow rather than the algorithm deciding what content to push to you?
We have the solution.
Indeed. And with AI and video generation, it's now (or within months) literally undetectable. The closer we get to US midterms, the more we'll see how bad it really can get this time around.
And the US elections in 2028? I can barely imagine.
And the massive problem is, most people I talk to still think what they see on youtube is real. But of course, people thought the TV show Survivor was real, too. It's not a new phenomenon.
But it is at crazy levels. I like your 'denial of service' designation, because even knowing the problem, maybe you can't find real info still.
While true, i don’t see how you can have one without the other.
“Fighting disinformation” is the banner under which free flow is necessarily interrupted.
Yes and no I think. If you analyse it, the censors will work to actually block channels where the truth can be shared. What's left over time is only the government sanctioned media, which over time becomes more and more corrupt with disinformation. So I think I agree with your second sentence but not your first, in that if we didn't pretend to fight disinformation, I think we wouldn't have so much of it.
queue Nina Janowicz at the piano
We don't. Search engines return a limited number of results from "trusted media" and dissident opinion, whether balanced or batshit crazy, is all lumped together as misinformation and conspiracy theory.
Search engines return a trove of SEO-optimized generated garbage. Search engines do not apply labels such as misinformation or conspiracy theory.
Try finding anything objective on the Ukraine war and you will find to have a constant narrative shoved down your throat
Actually they or at least social media does or used to do, peaking during the panny-d and dismantling the 'fake news' checks and balances during Trump II.
In Italy a left wing writer and historian declared publicly he was going to vote a certain way on a referendum and facebook flagged it as "fake news"… how could it be fake news if it was clearly just his own opinion and intent on what to do.