alt Hacker NewsIf you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy.
The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.
My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.
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> If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy
That is begging the question. What we have is not "people freely communicating on the Internet." We have bots, state actors spewing propaganda, paid shills, etc. Actual humans with actual opinions are the small minority, and unfortunately they are largely being informed by the bad actors so even then what we have is mostly crap.
But people aren't communicating freely. They are being throttled, shadow banned, refused etc. In some cases these are political candidates. Since this is one of the main channels of consumption these obvious and well documented manipulations are having a massive impact on political outcomes.
It's hardly the "freely communicating" part that's harming democracy. I find it hard to believe you're making this argument in good faith.
By what metric has it worked well?
As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".