This is unnecessarily confrontational. The real point here is that there better functioning democracies than the US. They have faults, but Scandinavia and much of northern Europe (partially excluding the UK) much better approximates what you call a fairytale than a US perspective might allow you to believe. Trust in and satisfaction with government institutions in Scandinavia and Finland are much, much higher than in the US, and it's largely justified by their competence and delivery of public goods.
That's like 3-5 out of 195 countries and only 0,3%-0,5% of the world's population. Being born there is like winning the lottery so maybe take that into consideration when arguing with such examples since that's not the norm. Like what are the odds that people you talk to online are part of that 0,5%? So who's the one being needlessly confrontational?
>Trust in and satisfaction with government institutions in Scandinavia and Finland are much, much higher than in the US
I don't care about the situation in the US since I don't live there. I'm talking from the perspective in Europe(not Scandinavia) where I can't say the democracy is representing or serving me. No law maker asked about the major decisions the EU made.
I really hope you're right. Sadly, though, I don't see any evidence of UK companies disinvesting from big US tech. There aren't good alternatives and what there is is too complex. As long as 'everyone else is still using MS', it seems like it's a brave CTO that switches to European providers. Unless that happens, the network effect of having AI+data is likely to mean US tech still has a big advantage in corp settings. But, HN - please tell me I'm wrong!
But the people with control of mechanisms of power like social influence do only care about money, so the voices of people who have other values become irrelevant.
You write as though the selection of information by algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes about by free actions of the people. But this is demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for misinformation which enrages (because it increases engagement) means that social media are pushing populations further and further to the right. And this serves the interest of the literal handful of billionaires who control those sites. This is the unhealthy concentration of power the OP writes about, and it is a threat to democracy as we've known it.
By that logic, the New York Times also threatens democracy. Of course, it doesn't, and that's because no amount of opinion, injected in whatever manner and however biased, can override the role of free individuals in evaluating everything they've heard and voting their conscience.
You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.
No. The difference is that the New York Times has not been specifically engineered to be an addictive black hole for attention. Algorithmic social media is something new. Concentration of press power has always been a concern in democracy and many countries have sorted to regulate disability of individuals to wield that power. We get to choose as a society the rules on which we engaged with one another. Algorithmic social media is an abuse of basic human cognitive processing and we could if we wanted agreed that it’s not allowed in the public. It’s not a question of censoring particular information or viewpoints. – Here is that the mechanism of distribution itself is unhealthy.
It's really simple in the US: stop granting exemptions for the harm the content causes. Social media _is_ publishing. Expecting people to 'eat their vegetables' when only fast food is on offer is realistic, and flies in the face of all we know about the environmental drivers of public health.
Normally that’s for software and it’s borne of irritation with enshittification and rent extraction from software that was previously free from that. SAAS is a risk if you invest time and energy in developing expertise in it. Lots of us have been burned many times in this way, and for me it’s one of the primary reasons I prefer open source software, beyond any purist gnu type arguments or anticapitlist sentiment.
No. The point here is that Google is not paid for the ads, so are not incentivised to make the service more addictive. This seems obvious: it’s not the ads we have a problem with per se—- it’s the distortion of they attention economy they entail.
Clearly any scheme will not be perfect but these sort of objections either seem to misunderstand the core issue, or to be willfully confusing by raising irrelevant details.
This is a truism, but not that helpful. I have to be lucky every time I leave the house not to be murdered, but it doesn't substantially change my behaviour. Rather than freaking out or catastrophising we just need to focus on asserting and celebrating and educating citizens in our shared values (murdering is bad, privacy is important).
Nah, I think in this metaphor we need to lock up Mr.Stabby McStabFace instead of just allowing him to go without punishment for his repeated efforts to legalize face-stabbing.
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