[Chapter-delegates] How digital technologies went from instruments for spreading democracy to weapons for attacking i

[tim at tmdenton.com]

Roughly speaking, the article appears to say - but does not actually say -that
1. Trump won the election
2. He used modern methods of communication
3. Therefore something is wrong with modern methods of communication.
4. The restoration of gatekeepers would improve things

However, the author actually says something completely different:

"Real wages in the US and Europe are stuck and have been for decades while corporate profits have stayed high and taxes on the rich have fallen. Young people juggle multiple, often mediocre jobs, yet find it increasingly hard to take the traditional wealth-building step of buying their own home—unless they already come from privilege and inherit large sums.

"If digital connectivity provided the spark, it ignited because the kindling was already everywhere. The way forward is not to cultivate nostalgia for the old-world information gatekeepers or for the idealism of the Arab Spring. It’s to figure out how our institutions, our checks and balances, and our societal safeguards should function in the 21st century—not just for digital technologies but for politics and the economy in general. This responsibility isn’t on Russia, or solely on Facebook or Google or Twitter. It’s on us.

A far more sensible argument than the choice of pictures and the first part of the article would appear to convey.
Timothy Denton



September 17, 2018 9:10 AM, "Richard Hill" <rhill at hill-a.ch> wrote:
> The article referenced below, published in the MIT Technology Review, explains how the Internet (or
> at least parts of it), which we all would like to remain open and interoperable, has evolved into a
> threat to democracy, and not because we chose to allow that, but because of actions and inactions
> by governments and actions by private companies:
> 
> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trum
> 
> 
> Here are some citations from the article:
> 
> " ... the handful of giant US social-media platforms seem to have been left to deal as they saw fit
> with what problems might emerge. Unsurprisingly, they prioritized their stock prices and
> profitability. Throughout the years of the Obama administration, these platforms grew boisterously
> and were essentially unregulated. They spent their time solidifying their technical chops for
> deeply surveilling their users, so as to make advertising on the platforms ever more efficacious.
> In less than a decade, Google and Facebook became a virtual duopoly in the digital ad market."
> 
> ...
> 
> "[Trump's] campaign also excelled at using Facebook as it was designed to be used by advertisers,
> testing messages on hundreds of thousands of people and microtargeting them with the ones that
> worked best."
> 
> ...
> 
> "However, social media isn’t the only seemingly democratizing technology that extremists and
> authoritarians have co-opted."
> 
> ...
> 
> "How did all this happen? How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling
> dictators to being used as tools of oppression and discord? There are several key lessons.
> 
> "First, the weakening of old-style information gatekeepers (such as media, NGOs, and government and
> academic institutions), while empowering the underdogs, has also, in another way, deeply
> disempowered underdogs. Dissidents can more easily circumvent censorship, but the public sphere
> they can now reach is often too noisy and confusing for them to have an impact. Those hoping to
> make positive social change have to convince people both that something in the world needs changing
> and there is a constructive, reasonable way to change it. Authoritarians and extremists, on the
> other hand, often merely have to muddy the waters and weaken trust in general so that everyone is
> too fractured and paralyzed to act. The old gatekeepers blocked some truth and dissent, but they
> blocked many forms of misinformation too.
> 
> "Second, the new, algorithmic gatekeepers aren’t merely (as they like to believe) neutral conduits
> for both truth and falsehood. They make their money by keeping people on their sites and apps; that
> aligns their incentives closely with those who stoke outrage, spread misinformation, and appeal to
> people’s existing biases and preferences. Old gatekeepers failed in many ways, and no doubt that
> failure helped fuel mistrust and doubt; but the new gatekeepers succeed by fueling mistrust and
> doubt, as long as the clicks keep coming.
> 
> "Third, the loss of gatekeepers has been especially severe in local journalism. While some big US
> media outlets have managed (so far) to survive the upheaval wrought by the internet, this upending
> has almost completely broken local newspapers, and it has hurt the industry in many other
> countries. That has opened fertile ground for misinformation. It has also meant less investigation
> of and accountability for those who exercise power, especially at the local level. The Russian
> operatives who created fake local media brands across the US either understood the hunger for local
> news or just lucked into this strategy. Without local checks and balances, local corruption grows
> and trickles up to feed a global corruption wave playing a major part in many of the current
> political crises.
> 
> "The fourth lesson has to do with the much-touted issue of filter bubbles or echo chambers—the
> claim that online, we encounter only views similar to our own. This isn’t completely true. While
> algorithms will often feed people some of what they already want to hear, research shows that we
> probably encounter a wider variety of opinions online than we do offline, or than we did before the
> advent of digital tools.
> 
> "Rather, the problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social
> media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from
> the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected
> with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by
> yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group”
> belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. Our
> cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects
> for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger
> than facts."
> 
> ...
> 
> "What is to be done? There are no easy answers. More important, there are no purely digital
> answers.
> 
> "There are certainly steps to be taken in the digital realm. The weak antitrust environment that
> allowed a few giant companies to become near-monopolies should be reversed. However, merely
> breaking up these giants without changing the rules of the game online may simply produce a lot of
> smaller companies that use the same predatory techniques of data surveillance, microtargeting, and
> “nudging.”
> 
> "Ubiquitous digital surveillance should simply end in its current form. There is no justifiable
> reason to allow so many companies to accumulate so much data on so many people. Inviting users to
> “click here to agree” to vague, hard-to-pin-down terms of use doesn’t produce “informed consent.”
> If, two or three decades ago, before we sleepwalked into this world, a corporation had suggested so
> much reckless data collection as a business model, we would have been horrified."
> 
> ...
> 
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