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A comment on A spambot became the second most powerful member of an Italian social network. Parent comment

Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by brey on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:08PM (#8139051)
Agreed. Related to this, there's a school of thought which says the ability for us to break laws which don't yet reflect updated social mores is key to preventing society stagnating, to force change in those laws.

Let's suppose 1960s civil rights campaigners had had their protests and civil disobedience clamped down on with the ruthless efficiency of what you could imagine policing becoming in a few decades -- if the firehose-wielding cops had also been able to know with perfect intelligence who was planning to break the law, and had been able to easily crush any nascent rebellion against the laws of the time, which we now recognise to be wrong. How easily would we have seen change under those circumstances?

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Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by yogabzzz on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @08:47PM (#8140369)
And you don't think the dissidents wouldn't use technology to circumvent the law enforcement bots? You don't seem to understand how brittle, rigid and flawed most/all of these algorithms are. With the right knowledge you can get around pretty much any technical system. Also, just a single person with that knowledge and the ability to implement it is a danger to the bloated, slow government(s) that might seek to use such a system.
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Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:09PM (#8139056)
By voting? Civil disobedience isn't the only path to changing laws; it just speeds it up sometimes.
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Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by vdaniuk on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:37PM (#8139254)
Voting is playing by the rules of the system. The world is changing too fast now to use that a reliable strategy.
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Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:55PM (#8139362)
Civil disobedience doesn't do anything permanent, unless it results in changes in law.
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Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by EGreg on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @06:08PM (#8139801)
The issue here is the rules of a human system are in danger of being subverted by people wielding massive computing power.
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Re:A spambot became the second most powerful member of an It... by pjc50 on Wednesday August 06, 2014 @06:53AM (#8141861)
This doesn't work when the issue is voter suppression. Also, "tyranny of the majority" is a real issue in race relations.
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