The problem is more directly "algorithmic feeds" and isn't exclusive or specific to social media. For example, news sites and media sites like Youtube and Spotify (which arguably have social aspects, but most people don't use them like social media) also contribute in similar ways. The root problem is the algorithm optimizing for attention mixing with human nature that tends to make negative reactions more powerful than positive reactions which causes the algorithms to create a sort of polarization death spiral.
It goes beyond that. Even chat platforms can be a problem now. IMO, I'm no sociologist but I'd love the viewpoint of one, human societies were very much non flat in terms of information, and cheap infinite internet collapsed the thin hierarchical nature of information-sharing and communication.
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.
I think there’s too much focus on the internet and social media here. We should look back to the printing press as the origin and mass media, and trace the development through to radio and television. The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
The thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content.
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.
I've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs.
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 :)
Religions cover a huge range of possibilities, the current concept where it’s shared across lots of people is relatively recent. Mystery cults as one example had hidden truths and didn’t create a shared reality.
The great winnowing of religion where the vast majority of humanity picks an offshoot of a handful of origins distorts our perception of what religion is.
Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate.
The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.
> The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
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.
mass media influenced and dominated people's understanding. it didn't do as much to expand it. to expand your understanding you had to and still have to do your own research and look at things that do not have mass appeal.
I couldn't read this article because Science.org left Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode enabled in their Cloudflare settings, causing me to be blocked by a “security verification”. If you use Cloudflare, disable bot stop modes by going to dash.cloudflare.com and selecting your domain and then clicking on “Security” and then clicking on “Settings” and then using the buttons to disable Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode.
Any story about threats by the Internet to democracy that revolve around Twitter has to account for the fact that only a minute portion of the electorate ever looks at Twitter.
The article mentions basically all major social media though.
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.
I couldn't agree more. One day I uninstalled twitter(x) and I just kinda forgot about it. A couple of times I tried to look at where the icon used to be and never really felt the urge to reinstall.
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.
(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.
So do the limitations (and requirements) of hardware and operating systems. And corporations and billionaires financing and supporting antidemocratic systems and politicians.
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)
Every single one of these "internet is a threat to our democracy" takes is really about a few things, none of which is a threat to 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.
> Those algorithmic biases have demonstrable behavioral consequences.
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.
Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
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.
And who is going to determine which voters are sufficiently educated on the topics to be allowed to vote? Do you not see how that could become problematic, in the wrong hands?
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".
> Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
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.
Can you give an example of a time when the biggest issue was one that people were uninformed about, not mis-informed? Because it seems to me that misinformation has been with us since ancient times, and has always dominated over simple uninformed behavior. Not a neat little quip though.
Well, the populist approach is to exploit that people are uninformed about most of the important topics and then induce fear with just one tiny topic. If people were better informed, they would see that the tiny topic didn't matter in the greater scheme.
...and it's what people have seen in real life with their own eyes, not what the government wants them to see. The Internet has made the former far more accessible to the population.
I think your supposition is correct. I think there is a common hypocrisy to the person craving democracy while showing revulsion at revealed preference. Many otherwise smart people can't seem to look at society without averting their eyes.
By 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.
The problem is more directly "algorithmic feeds" and isn't exclusive or specific to social media. For example, news sites and media sites like Youtube and Spotify (which arguably have social aspects, but most people don't use them like social media) also contribute in similar ways. The root problem is the algorithm optimizing for attention mixing with human nature that tends to make negative reactions more powerful than positive reactions which causes the algorithms to create a sort of polarization death spiral.
It goes beyond that. Even chat platforms can be a problem now. IMO, I'm no sociologist but I'd love the viewpoint of one, human societies were very much non flat in terms of information, and cheap infinite internet collapsed the thin hierarchical nature of information-sharing and communication.
> Even chat platforms can be a problem now.
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.
If that's what they mean, fully agreed.
I think there’s too much focus on the internet and social media here. We should look back to the printing press as the origin and mass media, and trace the development through to radio and television. The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
The thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content.
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.
With social media everyone can choose their own adventure
isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?
Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.
Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.
before mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.
I've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs.
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 :)
Religions cover a huge range of possibilities, the current concept where it’s shared across lots of people is relatively recent. Mystery cults as one example had hidden truths and didn’t create a shared reality.
The great winnowing of religion where the vast majority of humanity picks an offshoot of a handful of origins distorts our perception of what religion is.
Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate. The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.
> The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.
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.
mass media influenced and dominated people's understanding. it didn't do as much to expand it. to expand your understanding you had to and still have to do your own research and look at things that do not have mass appeal.
Isn’t the title inappropriate then? Shouldn’t it include “social media”?
I think the implication is that the architecture of the internet inevitably leads to social media companies driving for maximum engagement.
It’s definitely not explicitly stated though.
And the feeds are largely the way they are due to unregulated greed.
There is a different root cause then, perhaps.
I couldn't read this article because Science.org left Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode enabled in their Cloudflare settings, causing me to be blocked by a “security verification”. If you use Cloudflare, disable bot stop modes by going to dash.cloudflare.com and selecting your domain and then clicking on “Security” and then clicking on “Settings” and then using the buttons to disable Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode.
I was going to give an archive.is link, but they're blocked too.
Any story about threats by the Internet to democracy that revolve around Twitter has to account for the fact that only a minute portion of the electorate ever looks at Twitter.
The article mentions basically all major social media though.
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.
I couldn't agree more. One day I uninstalled twitter(x) and I just kinda forgot about it. A couple of times I tried to look at where the icon used to be and never really felt the urge to reinstall.
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.
Why not:
(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.
So do the limitations (and requirements) of hardware and operating systems. And corporations and billionaires financing and supporting antidemocratic systems and politicians.
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)
Mainstream narrative-shapers concerned that they are losing control of the narrative. Film at 11.
The article is literally about how megacorp controlled algorithms are shaping our politics and this is your take away?
Exactly. Everyone has been given a voice thanks to the Internet, and they call that "risks for democracy".
Every single one of these "internet is a threat to our democracy" takes is really about a few things, none of which is a threat to 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.
TL; DR: Develop and deploy algorithms that downrank or deprioritize anti-democratic, extremist, or polarizing content.
Just call your opponents anti-democratic, extremist or polarising and here you go. Democracy!
> Those algorithmic biases have demonstrable behavioral consequences.
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.
The danger to democracy has always been uninformed voters.
Now it is mis-informed voters.
Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
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.
Educated is not the same axis as informed
And who is going to determine which voters are sufficiently educated on the topics to be allowed to vote? Do you not see how that could become problematic, in the wrong hands?
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".
because of uneducated people we need to pick between Biden and Trump
> Maybe those who participate in democracy should have to demonstrate some level educations on the topics they vote on?
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.
Voters have always been misinformed, only the degree varied. And most of them decide to believe the things they want to believe anyhow.
the tragedy of allowing stupid people to vote.
pick one:
- stupid people vote without understanding what they vote for
- stupid people don't vote, but it's not a democracy anymore
Can you give an example of a time when the biggest issue was one that people were uninformed about, not mis-informed? Because it seems to me that misinformation has been with us since ancient times, and has always dominated over simple uninformed behavior. Not a neat little quip though.
Well, the populist approach is to exploit that people are uninformed about most of the important topics and then induce fear with just one tiny topic. If people were better informed, they would see that the tiny topic didn't matter in the greater scheme.
"mis-informed" meaning "not sanctioned by the Ministry of Truth"
There is truth
...and it's what people have seen in real life with their own eyes, not what the government wants them to see. The Internet has made the former far more accessible to the population.
I think your supposition is correct. I think there is a common hypocrisy to the person craving democracy while showing revulsion at revealed preference. Many otherwise smart people can't seem to look at society without averting their eyes.
Edit: Grammar.
Facts and reasoned debate come before democracy.
> The algos optimize for engagement
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
In the case of X, obviously. For Google and meta, I doubt it.
When people say "democracy" these days they really mean something closer to "technocracy". (Often they mean technocracy, laundered through democracy)