Oh that's easy. Every social news site has a groupthink--if it doesn't have one naturally, crowdsourced moderation, i.e. upvotes and downvotes, will end up creating it. You just set things up so the groupthink either agrees with The Agenda or gets angry at issues that don't impact the ruling party's agenda. Then you have the illusion of free speech and democracy without any actual risk to the power structure.
For instance, people on HN seem to get really worked up about the TSA, sexism in the tech industry, the war on drugs, and the privacy implications of Facebook and Google. If you were trying to protect a totalitarian state, do you really think any of those would be part of the agenda? Things like the TSA and war on drugs could be deliberately bad policy designed to distract the easily outraged. As for Facebook and Google, the worst thing they're going to do with your personal information is target advertisements at you. A totalitarian state would probably just build a system like Echelon.
As for Facebook and Google, the worst thing they're going to do with your personal information is target advertisements at you.
Sure, I bet that is what everyone is complaining about. It certainly can't be about the possibility of your private information ending up in hands that could do you harm with it, right? I mean, who in their right mind would be afraid of how a bank or an employer or a court or a government agency might use some innocuous bit of information they thought was private? After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of...
That's still rather irrelevant to the agenda of our hypothetical totalitarian state. You know, the one that taps the Internet backbones and data mines it all anyway. I'm not saying its unworthy of criticism, just that it's not a fundamental challenge to the Powers That Be.
