Social Media Democracy Threat

No the comment is not about dictators, it is about democracies falling.Update: take for example google/twitter/facebook and how they have a lot of control over what we do online. Because they have that info they can influence our lives. Facebook's mood experiment is a recent example. Also if a picture of an election candidate is shared a lot, that candidate gets more votes by causation. Google/twitter/facebook don't have a political agenda behind their abilities

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit are probably the biggest threats to our democracy in the world. They are highly trafficked sites that huge populations get all of their information from. They are also staunchly only in favor of one political party and have been caught abusing their power to favor their political party of choice. Twitter suppresses hashtags, Facebook filters posts, Google only sends news notifications for news they approve of, Reddit openly suppresses subreddits with opposing

This "social media spreading democracy around the world" may need to be re-evaluated soon.

Concern over Facebook being a powerful tool used to influence elections.

Well, for one, democratic countries are supposed to be governed by representatives elected by people, not by corporate boards.Ability to selectively enable or disable people from being able to access voters is tantamount to having a huge influence on election results.While in the past you could avoid using social media, today this is THE way to reach most of voters. Most people no longer pay substantial attention to what happens on television, forgot what radio is (it is a little bit of no

Facebook and Google alone could effectively change "facts" to suit their political agendas. They alone could easily heavily influence the democratic process all over the world. That is far more dangerous than some guys with guns.

Personally, for sinister reasons I like what FB/Twitter and other high profile companies are doing right now. All this meddling with politics, openly taking sides and censoring based on arbitrary rules like a cesar pointing thumb up and down - I'm pretty convinced (and I hope!) that especially for "social media" giants this will sooner or later backfire and will be one of reasons of their demise, improvement or at least significant reduction of influence.All of this serves

I strongly agree.But I'm also increasingly worried that we're not very far from losing this. It already seems like social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are increasingly controlled by US propaganda and corporate interests. It's hard to know how far gone what we think is true freedom of speech and democratization of voice already is.

From a tech perspective, we should be considering the part we have played in these events.I’ve come to the conclusion that democracy cannot coexist alongside unfettered propaganda divorced from truth. That is what social media represents - Twitter and especially Facebook - machinery for manipulating people without regard to truth.Trump and Brexit have greatly harmed the West and their ability to respond to Russian aggression. Both were made possible by the social media companies.We obvi

That depends on the asset.I can argue that Facebook's incentive to help politicians manipulate my community has far greater impact on me. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter enabling algorithmic propaganda, I will lose my right to live and work in the UK.I wonder how organic were all these uprisings that were organised on Facebook and Twitter. These things changed the middle east and Europe.Check out Zeynep Tufekci, a scholar doing wonderful job in researching these issues. Recent artic