Voters are too stupid to form their own decisions, but oddly, that doesn't mean democracy is a sham.

Democracy exists because voters are too stupid to form their own decisions. It relies on the hope that stupid decisions are largely random, while informed decisions will all tend in the same direction. It takes only a small minority of people to know what they're doing, if the uninformed ones can be counted on to mostly cancel each other out.

That's obviously a fraught assumption, but mass media puts an increasingly large wrinkle in it. It takes only a small thumb on the scale of uninformed votes to overpower a minority of informed voters, and new techniques increasingly enable people with a lot of money to apply that thumb. If only 1% of voters are informed, and a misinformation campaign can sway 2% of otherwise evenly-divided voters, it becomes the dominant factor -- even if the informed voters are unswayed.

Thought provoking.

Why attract the signal when you can attract the noise?

Mass media has been with us for a long time though. What's different about it now? Are people focusing on fewer media sources as time passes, or more media sources? If we're focusing on more media sources, wouldn't that play well in your idea that dumb votes will cancel out?

What's different now is the pervasiveness and precision of mass media. News used to be kind of restricted: a newspaper in the morning, maybe an hour of TV news at night. You might discuss it at the water cooler or family gatherings.

This changed in the 90s with the 24 hour news cycle, which shifted the news from a duty you performed as a citizen, to entertainment for hours a day. Then social media meant you could argue about it all day long -- again, for entertainment. People have always been susceptible to media manipulation, but they've never spent as much time willingly exposing themselves to it and reinforcing it on each other.

I don't believe the number of media sources is an issue. The truth is readily accessible. It's hard to be genuinely informed on a matter involving expertise, but that just leads to the conventional dumb votes. Now, people are seeking out misinformation, which is different from ordinary ignorance. It used to be hard to target people for actively disinforming them, but techniques for that have been improving for decades.

In the last 15 years, campaign spending doubled in real terms, advertising moved to new digital media which are more targeted and harder to regulate, and the Supreme Court gutted Congress’s ability to address these problems with legislation.

But we've had mass media for a long time, whereas social media advertising is a rare concept. The former probably has a much greater effect.

The only reason people are concerned now is because Trump manipulated the electorate in a different way than politicians usually do, and this is a great violation of tradition.

People have been concerned for a while. Even before social media, there was a shift from what was widely perceived as a roughly balanced TV news media, to major news channels run by party donors and being quite clear that they were skewing the news for their benefit. These, along with even more obviously ideological web sites and social media bubbles, were causing "epistemic closure" that helped people believe even the most obvious falsehoods.

It's true that this ratcheted up to 11 in the last major election, and was co-opted by somebody outside of the establishment. In the end, the establishment pivoted, and are getting nearly all of their goals met. More, in fact, than under their own plans. So they're pretty happy about it, and see it more as an innovation for their benefit than as a violation.

I don't mean to be picking sides here. In theory, the same tools are available to their opponents, and I'm sure they're trying to. In practice, I suspect that they will not fare as well using the same techniques. They'll continue to develop others, just as they had used social media innovatively in the past two.

The world does not exist as a series of binary choices.

So why don't we make it illegal for politicians to lie? It seems much fairer. After all, corporations aren't allowed to put out misleading ads, so why should politicians?

It's a smaller harm if I buy diet products that don't work than if I vote for a politician who does the exact opposite of what he promised. Yet only the former is illegal.

Here we have Donald Trump's 'Contract with the American Voter': https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landings/contract/O-TRU-102.... How much of this did he accomplish?

> So why don't we make it illegal for politicians to lie?

Lying, especially when Politicians do it, isn't a binary. There are varying degrees of truth, deliberate omissions, and a difficult to discern intent. So it would be incredibly difficult to enforce.

So your only qualm is that it would be difficult to enforce? After all, this does not seem to be a problem with false marketing.

My qualm is that it would be impossible to enforce. And I don't really think that false marketing is as big of a problem as most people think because marketing tends to sell simulations, not promises of reality. When you see most advertisements, they're promising simulacrum: a hatchback filled with happy-looking, outdoorsy people; axe body spray being insatiable to women; someone actually drinking diet Pepsi (editorializing a bit on this last one). You don't need to make marketing claims if you just imitate the idealized form. This seems to echo many American politician's rhetoric: the entire Democratic field is representing an idealized form wherein their presidency could somehow overcome the blockade of the Senate.

In the United States, making it illegal for politicians to lie is usually regarded as inconsistent with the First Amendment.