> There is a question of aptitude... the ability to affect even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the direction of the country.
At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself?
Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already.
First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters.
And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines.
But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.
Undermining any kind of trust in democratic institutions seems like a possible goal of these manipulations, especially if Russia is involved. It shores up the argument for “managed democracy” as Putin calls it, and gives autocrats something to point and laugh at when challenged on their autocracy. If rational people start to think in terms of historically failed and discredited notions of government, that’s a boon to any adversary of democratic nations.
At risk of poking a hornet's nest, isn't this basically just an argument against democracy itself?
Sure, you can go around shutting down Twitter bots, but if the fundamental problem is "elections are swung by people who believe literally anything they read, and we can't change that" then we've basically lost already.
First, because it'll move to a new source, and playing media whack-a-mole to maintain a functioning government doesn't seem reliable. Second, because deciding what's a valid source suddenly becomes the defining feature of elections. Deciding which voices to promote and which to undermine obvious matters, but if Twitter bots are a vital issue in a national election then one starts to wonder if anything else matters.
And I mean, I know one argument is that this has always been the case, that the only new thing is the ability for unfiltered manipulation to come straight into people's homes. I suppose it's true that in ~1800 most people couldn't possibly get enough information to make informed voting decisions, so we were largely getting our decisions made by political officials and party machines.
But it's a bit scarier to think that the problem is people, not access - if that's true then expanding information access is actually harmful to democracy.