Re:The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it...
by TheOtherHobbes on Saturday August 25, 2018 @06:14AM
(#17840293)
It's not about conversation so much as the easy industrialisation of propaganda and election fixing.
FB and TW make it far too easy to set up bots and troll farms to influence public debate for relatively tiny amounts of money.
And FB has also been used to supply individually targeted political advertising - which makes it easy to swing an election or a referendum by influencing a few million, or even just a few hundred thousand, people - by lying to them.
This is part of a bigger problem in the Western democracies, where it's considered perfectly okay for billionaires to use media empires to influence voters with knowingly fake outright propaganda.
The conversation part is largely irrelevant. A lot of people will simply parrot talking points they're given by the media, so there is in fact no real conversation or debate happening.
FB and TW make it far too easy to set up bots and troll farms to influence public debate for relatively tiny amounts of money.
And FB has also been used to supply individually targeted political advertising - which makes it easy to swing an election or a referendum by influencing a few million, or even just a few hundred thousand, people - by lying to them.
This is part of a bigger problem in the Western democracies, where it's considered perfectly okay for billionaires to use media empires to influence voters with knowingly fake outright propaganda.
The conversation part is largely irrelevant. A lot of people will simply parrot talking points they're given by the media, so there is in fact no real conversation or debate happening.