No they did not. You don't go to Twitter/Facebook because your free will has been "shut down". You do it because you like it. If you don't want to do it, it is very easy to stop. You won't have excruciating pain and debilitating disease if you don't read what she did next, you heart won't stop and your brain won't shut down if you don't learn one weird trick to burn body fat and make all people of your preferred gender to fall in love with you forever. Literally nothing would happen. You decide whether to do it or not. If you decide to do it, it's ok - it is your time, your life, if you want to spend a little bit of it reading about one weird trick or looking at funny cats, who am I to say no? Go for it. But please stop blaming somebody else for your decision to do it. You have free will. Embrace it.
Click-bait is a real thing. It triggers a deep psychological need, varying from "let me read this article and comment on how wrong everyone is" to "this is psychological porn that completely agrees with how I feel". Companies whose business model is based on keeping your attention have gotten really good at keeping your attention. Its a form of break-down of free will. Like getting a whiff of the good stuff, when you really should know better to avoid it. Its not really that hard to understand, and I'm sure you understand it already. Whats unexplained is why you chose to blame the victim when there is an entire industry dedicated to setting up the trap.
What justifies your certainty here? If history proves anything, it’s that people are eminently manipulable. That’s no surprise: we’re biological machines at the endpoint of eons of evolution. We’re not gods. Of course we can be hacked.
Did you write this comment on your own free will or was manipulated into it by an invisible puppet master? If the latter, what would be the point of me trying to convince you of anything - you can't be convinced, since your actions are not sourced in you, but in the will of your puppetmaster! However, somehow you and me are discussing things. By that you prove that you, too, believe in free will - otherwise there would be no point in you discussing anything, after all you are controlled by your puppetmaster, and I am controlled by mine, so what's the point in us puppets exchanging words, if nothing can be ever changed by our will?
The only point of having discussions, views, principles, debates, ideas, politics - is f you have free will. Otherwise this whole thing has no meaning.
> Of course we can be hacked.
Surely. There is lots of ways to subjugate other's will - by violent force, by trickery, by fraud, by lies, we have no shortage of ways developed over thousands of years to do it. That however does not deny the premise there's something to be forced, or tricked, or deceived - and thus also something that can be free from force or deception. You can be deceived, but you can also resist the deception. You will not always win, but you'll never win if you surrender in advance.
Besides which, psychology and neurology tell us that most of the time we haven't a clue what our underlying motivations are[0]. We do not have the ability to introspect our unconscious motivations, but that doesn't mean they are immune to external influence and manipulation.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion#Unrel...
But a lot of the things people are saying here are the culmination of many other actions which have been repeated over the past many years and are finally coming to a head.
secondly - you continually make an error of generalization.
Yes, one single particular individual may be able to exercise free will. But Most dont even know that their will is being attacked.
Its not like these are telegraphed villains with evil laughs saying "I'm going to take your freedom".
This is candy crush, with its intentionally neutral and happy pictures. Its facebook, with its memmories and your friends.
WHY would anyone stop that?
Sure, someone in this thread, who is a techie and has read the past 2 months of tech news, may have an idea of what to defend.
In that very narrow, individual scenario - yes, he has a choice.
Yours is the craftsmans argument, in a world which has just seen the advent of the assembly line. Certain individuals may well craft their own will.
Those few are considered flaws in the system, and the system itself constantly focuses on those people they CAN get, and who are NOT aware, or have the wherewithal or lack the interest in stopping it.
Hell, people don't want to wear helmets when they ride motorcycles; we couldnt get people to waste less water when they shower, and instead there was an active movement to deny climate change.
Programs which never sleep, eat, and cost tiny amounts of money to execute. So even if you never log in, they just lie in wait.
The armies arrayed against an individual are far greater than what a normal person can hope to deal with - unless they drop everything and focus on beating it.
And why would a normal person do that? SO that he can keep free will? Most people would give up their free will if it would guarantee that their kids have a future, that they get food, and shelter.
Let's just assume you answer "yes" (because to answer "no" would be unimaginably absurd)... lets also imagine that billions of dollars are up for grabs to the people/companies who can manipulate/trick sound of mind people better than anyone else... What would that world look like?
Well, we're living in it.