Undermine platforms free#
In this situation, are we losing our ability to make rational decisions, and instead, ceding our free will to artificial intelligence? What is a democracy without free will? The government needs to step in and regulate social platforms Algorithms enter our very psyches, learning what people's trigger points are and tailoring individualized messages to them. But today's platforms have essentially become guns for hire, targeting individualized messages under the radar, with little accountability for the sources of content published. Though propaganda has always been part of politics, it typically has been broadcast to the public by visible actors. Extremism thrives on the left and the right. Citizens become increasingly individualistic, self-referential, and convinced of their own rightness, unwilling to listen to others. Instead, "information bubbles" are formed that lead to confirmation bias. Therefore social media is not the revived " public sphere" that people wish it were, as it does not encourage fruitful political dialogue with those who hold different views from one's own.
Undermine platforms how to#
Users of social media are nudged into engaging mostly with "friends" and "followers" with whom they already share values, opinions, and beliefs, and each keystroke is recorded for the explicit purpose of better predicting how to change individual behavior. The problem is not only that people cannot garner the facts they need to fulfill their role as informed citizens. With one study finding 55% of Americans say they get at least some of their news from social media, and the numbers rising, American citizens are bound to become increasingly confused and ill-informed.
It becomes difficult to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Falsehoods and emotions travel like wildfire relative to the truth. In the absence of the fact-checking gatekeepers of traditional media, organized disinformation campaigns orchestrated by algorithms can spread false information and manipulate our emotions and actions at very low cost. The ability of their algorithms to observe us and cause us to act in ways that maximize advertising revenue should make us question whether free will and genuine debate is even possible. Facebook's mission statement promises to " give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." A free marketplace of ideas has always been regarded as a key ingredient of liberal democracy, hence the idea that internet platforms, like newspapers, should be free from government control.īut our traditional preoccupation with government control is distracting us from a larger threat: Social-media platforms are able to manipulate us at will based on operators' choices that are invisible to us. Some scholars and business leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have suggested the internet is good for democracy because it facilitates information sharing and brings people together to solve important challenges. This is a vexing problem that urgently needs the attention of our lawmakers in Congress, regardless of who is president. In other words, the larger threat to liberal democracy is not Trump but how the algorithms that helped put him in power are wielded as weapons to undermine democracy itself. A liberal democracy requires an informed public, not one that can be manipulated psychologically without its awareness. The same algorithms that are effective at personalized target marketing have been shown to be effective at mass manipulation. The people he warned about were clearly President Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party.īut there is a larger threat to liberal democracy: the growing power of social-media platforms. "Do not let them take away your power - don't let them take away your democracy," Obama said.
Former President Barack Obama issued a dire warning during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August: Our democratic institutions are under threat like never before.
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