The use of social media in politics since the election of Barrack Obama is one of the defining features of the modern political era. During and since the election of Donald Trump, it's become the primary method that politicians and their parties use to carve out their space and attract voters.
If we were just having reasonable discussions about policies online, but that's obviously how things have gone. This article from Gizmodo looks at what's happened over the last few years and where things might be going. It's not a pretty picture.
How you shatter the funhouse mirror that connects posters and power is one of the defining issues of our time. Social media has both warped the incentives of politics and pumped a steady stream of poison and lies into our discourse. Democrats and both houses of Congress have signalled democratic reforms are high on the priority list for this session. Among possible fixes are ranked choice voting; Washington, DC; statehood; automatic and same-day voter registration; and other fixes that would bring more people into the political process and reduce the abilities of extremists to hold power.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies could also face regulation. How to do that without limiting legitimate speech or putting too much power into the hands of Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey is a delicate balancing act. Among suggestions from a report released late last year are slowing the spread of viral content and reducing the ability to microtarget ads to individuals as means to the prevalence of misinformation. Other proposals include making social media publicly owned utilities, though that raises risks about giving too much power to the government to regulate speech and the public square. What is clear, though, is that the current situation is untenable. Continuing down this path will ensure the public square is taken over by mobs again and again, screaming about Jewish space lasers and lusting for blood, marshalled and egged on by a congresswoman from Georgia, a senator from Texas, and an online economy fueled by the worst posts we can dredge up.
My own take on it is that there has to be a return to something like the Fairness Doctine that was in effect for mass media until the 1980s and that would apply both to conventional mass media (newspapers, radio, and television) and social media like Facebook and Twitter.
This is not just an abstract argument. The political turmoil of the last few years has had real and devastating consequences on peoples' lives, and will continue to do so, unless a way can be found to dial down the heat so to speak.
When a person close to you has fallen down that rabbit hole, when you’re left shouting into the void with nothing but anger and pain, sometimes the only solution is to unfriend and move on. That’s easier said than done, especially when it’s family. If they do ever manage to see the error of their ways, do you welcome them back into your life? I believe in redemption, but I also believe in personal boundaries.
The issue here is trust. What happens when a former partner or friend or family member decides to crawl back into your life? There is a reason why white supremacist groups target QAnon followers for recruitment. How can you be sure that the friend that once so easily fell for tales of pedophile cannibal Democrats running a massive child-sex-trafficking cabal isn’t into adjacent far-right garbage? In my friend-losing experience, QAnon and further deprecation of already marginalized groups went hand-in-hand.
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