Re:Yes, social media is undermining democracy
by mro_name on Thursday July 28, 2022 @03:23PM
(#32269013)
legislation should not be delegated to a stable, forseeable, small number of possible actors. Corruption starts spot on. In a representative democracy legislation is a people duty because it is about the rules for all of us. So we have to decide.
Still the effort is brutal and requires full-time. So we need professionals (for a period), because we also need the lesser motivated people's views.
Social media (as is today) is to fragile, to toxic, to susceptible to surveillance and censorship, to centralised and to non-inclusive (in sum: non convival) to be even helpful.
How about more direct democracy? Representative democracy is a compromise for an era when the will of the people was practically too challenging to collect - something which has been solved in large part by social media. Perhaps the problems described by the author of the article is precisely the tension between a legacy system, made obsolete by new communication technology. If this is the case, we need to embrace more technology, not less and really lean into it. Maybe we could do a geo-fenced direct democracy for example?