This comment fails to account for the fact that communicating via software is different than communicating offline.
If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him. Such an outcome may be illiberal (it deprives the drunkard of his voice), but since it fulfills the wishes of the majority, it is highly democratic.
If a drunkard wanders onto social media and harasses everyone, what happens next depends on the design of the social media site.
Social media, like most online media, causes people to behave and to think differently than they would offline. There's a low limit to what we can correctly extrapolate about humanity in general from the behavior of humans on arbitrarily-designed social media websites.
> If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him.
Let me introduce you to Reddit.
Although on Reddit, you may be digitally removed for merely saying something unpopular.
A decade ago Reddit hosted all manner of offensive (and sometimes literally illegal) content. It's not human nature that changed; it's the design of Reddit that changed.
If we make generalizations about society using social media sites, we have to take into account that the design of a site, and the idiosyncrasies of online communication, foster unique kinds of behavior.
But Reddit is by far the best counterargument to all these articles. It not only has the effect of suppressing new viewpoints and arguments that might make the viewpoints a correct (or incorrect) one, but it also has the effect of fueling resentment/blame against the left-wing because people mainly interact with the left-wing of the internet on a daily basis and see the left wing suppressing their personal complaints, and Reddit may have had the unintended consequence of helping the right wing by making them a protest party. The moderation on the site has managed to turn the entire global redditsphere into a US left wing echochamber completely aloof from the localities being represented.
The article argues that the effect of social media is to weaken democracy. And the comment to which I responded, as I understand it, argues that social media, in itself, represents a flowering of democracy.
My own view is a variation of 'the medium is the message': that social media molds the world to suit itself.
Online platforms all have idiosyncrasies: one platform incentivizes performative behavior, another incentivizes flame-wars, a third leads users to misjudge the prevalence of some subculture in society, and so on.
So I agree with the article that social media is weakening democracy, in as much as we have designed social media sites stupidly. And I disagree with the comment to which I responded, insofar as, if social media represents a flowering of democracy, it represents democracy based on people who are effectively in an altered state of mind.
I don't know if flowering is the right word, that might be too rosy of a picture (sorry, bad pun).
I don't mean to attach a value judgement to direct democracy. If you asked me to, I'd agree that it's something thats doomed to fail.
I just find it ironic that an elite media institution makes the argument that something that ostensibly lets every person (all of the 'demos') voice their opinion is undermining "democracy".
I find it hard to explain the amusement that I get from this scenario... it's sort of like a double entendre. If you use the original literal meaning of the word democracy, the headline seems like an obvious contradiction (letting all the people speak is undermining rule by the people!). If you translate democracy to "our specific form of democracy" or just "our current system" then the effect goes away.
Of course a lot of this relies on social media being some perfect public forum, which it obviously isn't. I just saw some comedy to the situation is all.
I see some truth to that, but I tend to focus on all the possible versions of the internet we could have designed, probably some would be dystopic, and others utopic.
I also can see the irony in democracy falling to democracy, but, at the risk of sounding preachy, we should remember that the most infamous dictatorships of the 20th Century sprang from democratic elections.
Democracy leading to non-democracy isn't the irony i was talking about.
The irony is in an institution that has enormous power in our system complaining that giving the little people a chance to speak up is somehow undermining the ability of those little people to self-govern.
Edit: In other words, social media may not be perfectly representative of the people's will, but it's almost certainly more so than what comes out of something like the atlantic. On top of that, you could argue that social media diminishes the power of an institution like the atlantic. That is the irony.
If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him. Such an outcome may be illiberal (it deprives the drunkard of his voice), but since it fulfills the wishes of the majority, it is highly democratic.
If a drunkard wanders onto social media and harasses everyone, what happens next depends on the design of the social media site.
Social media, like most online media, causes people to behave and to think differently than they would offline. There's a low limit to what we can correctly extrapolate about humanity in general from the behavior of humans on arbitrarily-designed social media websites.