That’s manipulation by traditional media upset their worldview and power to project it is slipping away from them.
I'm from India where we have a similar term in the political lexicon - "vote-bank politics". It's means a policy that a plurality of voters (the "bank") like and want, but you don't. If you're within the vote bank, then it's no longer vote-bank politics, it's democracy in action.
The sort of "populism" without a leader discussed in this article is nothing like that. But there are political powers that wish to ignore that a lot of people can be legitimately angry at the same time.
Now of course editorials and editorializing _is_ understandably different but unfortunately that wall has been completely breached and demolished.
CSPAN and arguably PBS are probably the only TV "news" networks that don't use every trick in the book to try and keep you watching so they can make more money by showing you more ads.
Advocating for outright bans on voicing disfavoured viewpoints is so obviously illiberal and thuggish as to be politically unpopular, which is why it is always platforms targeted rather than individual speakers, and why there is always some rationalisation for the complaint other than the viewpoint being expressed (Russian bots! Fake news! Algorithms optimising for rage! Harassment!) but in the end the root cause of the complaint is always that someone said something that progressives didn't like.
(This is not an argument against anonymity; I don't need to know where these accounts really live. I do need to know where political advertising is funded from, because there are laws about that.)
While I don't claim to have researched this issue in depth and it's worth taking this with a pinch of salt, I'm yet to see any evidence of this, nor has it been a part of most of the leftist reporting I've seen. The only instance I've heard of where a specific Twitter account has been accused of being a Russian misrepresenting their nationality was ian56789, and that accusation was false, as he demonstrated by going on Sky News and giving an interview.
There's really two parts to the populist wave: "establishment politics isn't delivering what we need" and "we must turn to what seems like a Man of the People". The first has some extremely valid points, the second has (mostly) been a total disaster.
Enabling horizontal communication, not controlled by the Mainstream Mass Media.
that's what they want. The media and many government officials have been implying that the citizens are simply too stupid to be trusted with filtering their information so the glorious government must restrict what they're allowed to see. At what point will they decide the common man is simply too dumb to vote and get rid of democracy as well?
All this talk is demeaning and shows what our cultured elites really think about us, that we're a bunch of dumb cattle that need to be controlled
This is foundation of American democracy actually. In the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).
I don't think it is fair to consider large-scale censorship as the only other alternative. Having some kind of neutral editorial process to filter out the unsubstantiated, hateful opinions and leave room for a more nuanced discussion raises the level of discourse, and is the model that have been offered by traditional media for a long time.
The problem with this view is that one person's hateful opinion is another person's oppressed minority opinion. There aren't many objective truths, moderators just end up enforcing their own world view (which we've already seen Facebook do).
If the internet is meant to be a platform on which people can express themselves freely (and I believe it is) then unsubstantiated and hateful opinions are a given, not a sign that the internet has failed, but that it's succeeded.
What failed is the naive, idealist expectation that the internet would raise the level of intellectual and cultural awareness of the planet, but I don't think many people really believed in that to begin with.
It depends on how exactly you define 'improvement'. Millions of people, speaking freely to each other, finding new friends sharing common interests would disagree with you.
The improvement I was talking about was the hope that the increased access to online communication would engage more people in constructive public discourse, include the voices of minorities and bring people with different backgrounds to a greater understanding of each other. Platforms like Facebook have utterly failed at that.
I'm of the view point that censorship is exactly the point of articles like this. They want Facebook to enforce a very bias view of what is acceptable speech, and intentionally conflate being a communication platform with being responsible for the outcomes of that communication.
By all means, criticize Facebook for privacy issues, but not for stuff like this, unless you actually want censorship on the largest scale ever in history.