>> I think the idea that Facebook is putting democracy in peril is a bit farfetched.

Why? History has proven at least a few times that he who controls information can control people, and it never ends well. Even if Facebook is not deliberately trying to implant any ideas or spread misinformation and fake news, its platform can be (and has been, demonstrably) used for this purpose.

There's some irony in the fact that the ongoing scandal is about Facebook partially relinquishing control of information to a third-party (in fact, all third parties), and that the implied remedy was for Facebook to keep total control of information to itself.

A friend and I in highschool discussed the possibility of governments archiving and recording telephone calls and then using that data to figure out what people's political leanings were to tailor a manchurian candidate. This was years before social media.

Now people gladly give up their data for fame/notoriety.

Yeah I agree I noticed that myself.

Any other social media can be abused in roughly the same way. Twitter has its bot problems, and I'm sure given enough popularity mastodon will face the same issues too.

history also shows that people shoot the messengers.

while Cambridge Analytica is clearly a horrible company the idea of gathering data and building some models to better target advertisement to them is something totally normal happening all over the place. And i don't think we can really dismantel the core of online advertising because of one shady company

It's not that CA is just gathering data and using that data to target ads. That's normal. But they've also been using fake news, spy operations, honeypots, and other tactics in order to manipulate people. They've even boasted about their ability to manufacture sex scandals by sending prostitutes to a political opponent. That goes above and beyond what is "totally normal happening all over the place".

Dynamite is only interesting because it burns very quickly, in an energetic reaction. Things burn all the time, so I don't see why dynamite is all that interesting.

Evaluating something based on its known external traits without discussing the context in which they're used is an incomplete assessment.

One? Have you been not been paying attention to the last decade of internet advertising?

I remember not thinking much of the whole CA story back when I read about it (few years ago?), but what makes me less certain about this is that they might have vastly more data to work with than I initially thought.

I'm not a data scientist though, so I'd really like to hear why that is/isn't a problem. Basically: assuming one has massive datasets that can be combined, how dangerous can even basic analysis be?

i guess that depends what do you think democracy should look like. it was plenty broken before zuck was admitted to harvard.

There will probably be something else to blame after facebook, until people realize there is an inherent problem with majoritocracy that just cant be solved. As the elites are unlikely to go back to authoritarian regimes, it will probably drag things towards libertarianism.

Completely agree. Just another example of people over reacting. The other fun part is people trying to explain how it was okay back in '12, but now it's a tragedy.

The fact that Donald Trump is the President of the United States should be evidence enough that democracy is in serious danger.

Democracy is not in danger, this is exactly what democracy is. Like it or not but he is quite a telling representative of a big part of the population. And democracy means majority rules. As simple as that. Consider it in light of 80-20 %% rule.

> And democracy means majority rules. As simple as that.

Popular vote totals:

62,984,825: Trump 65,853,516: Clinton

Vote weights, per state, due to the electoral college: https://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-t...

Also of course there are things like gerrymandering and voter suppression to consider. Democracy is a pretty complicated mess.

Oh please give it a rest with the “popular vote” crap. Everyone knew the rules, and the very good reasons behind them. And we all know perfectly well that all this CA outrage would be a complete non-story if the other side had used them.

That's not about democracy per se, that's electoral college/states specifics.

Still democracy in general is exactly "majority rules". In democratic society of 100 people opinion of 51 would be enough to trump and ignore whatever remaining 49 want.

That is democracy working as intended. We have just realized that democracy and widespread, instant communication are incompatible.

> We have just realized that democracy and widespread, instant communication are incompatible.

I'd say that's absolutely not true - it's a demonstration that the republic system is broken. He lost the popular vote, yet still won. That's anti-democratic, whilst being pro-republic.

True democracy would still work fine if done pragmatically - have people, when registering to vote, be given a PGP key. Have them send in a cryptographically signed email with their vote - verify that it's from the right person. Maybe package it in a very simple GUI.

Instantly, everything impractical and or wrong about the current "democracy" we have is gone, and actual democracy can start taking place.

Not sure if you forgot the '/s' tag. Please consider how widely PGP is used, and how capable someone in the bottom decile of technical savvy would be of doing that.

I think it is important that our elections use systems that are readily comprehensible to laypeople.

Cryptography is, at its core, easy to explain to the layman. (PBS explained it fairly well on a kids' show a while back, I believe.) A GUI wrapper made to send secure emails isn't a particularly difficult thing for your average user, either.

You could make it as simple as downloading an app, going to get you physically registered, having the govt. official input relevant keys into the app, and then:

Type In Your Preferred Candidate Here: [INPUT BOX]

[SEND BUTTON]

With an automatic reply saying "Thank you for voting!" at the end of it.

Though it is possible to set up a GUI to do that, I don't think it is possible to do it in a way that makes it easy to confirm that the app is really doing what it claims to. You may be able to create a system where experts can verify the integrity, but I don't think you can create a computerized system where average people can independently verify the integrity of the system.

Paper, managed by trusted humans, really shines in this kind of task. Maybe some of the trusted humans will turn out to be dishonest, but it is much harder to commit large scale fraud and then cover it up.

Open-source the application, and have people check the checksums of the .IPAs and .APKs if they want to verify. A simple GUI wrapper for email wouldn't be particularly complicated implementation-wise, so it wouldn't take a security analyst to vet, either.

But the problems we had with the last election weren't caused by fraudulent voting. Everyone voted properly, it's just that another country spent some money convincing us to vote the way that they wanted us to. Even if we moved to a direct democracy system and gave everybody unbreakable crypto, it wouldn't stop them from watching TV and sharing junk on social media.

Remember, Trump lost the popular vote. If we had moved to a direct democracy system, assuming as little changes as you say will, he wouldn't be standing in the White House now.

The reason for crypographically secure voting is to stop any form of election-interference that could happen, because that naturally would be the biggest concern from moving to a digital solution.

why ? not really. ancient athens was like that and in retrospect it worked well.