
Social media is a threat to our democracy: Carole Cadwalladr speaks at TED2019 - mpweiher
https://blog.ted.com/social-media-is-a-threat-to-our-democracy-carole-cadwalladr-speaks-at-ted2019/
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Bartweiss
I think people underestimate just how extreme this sort of assertion is. To
quote Cadwalladr: _" I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair
elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken."_

Apparently, decentralized media and the threat of foreign meddling are reason
enough to believe that liberal democracy is not just working poorly, not just
compromised at present, but _permanently impossible_.

Without getting into specific charges, I think the claim is completely
ahistorical. Compared to the media of the 1990s, it's relatively easy to frame
wild misinformation as a newly-released genie that's going to change
everything forever. But the early history of US democracy, until perhaps 1850
or 1900, was overwhelmingly one of limited and misleading information. US
history classes celebrate as breakthroughs in democracy a great many things
that fall far short of Cadwalladr's measure for a doomed republic. Mass media
connected politicians directly to their public - but FDR used the threat of
antitrust suits to have radio stations spike any stories critical of him.
Cheap printing and mass literacy opened access to printed news, which lied the
country into the Spanish-American war. Thomas Nast helped inform the masses
and break the boss system - by bringing their knowledge of politics to the
now-decried level of "regurgitating political cartoons". Early presidential
campaigns were overwhelmingly conducted by spreading lies about the opposing
candidate to voters who could not possibly fact-check them, so blatantly that
much of modern negative campaigning looks wholesome.

I don't particularly want to go back to the information levels of 1800, but I
also don't think we're particularly at risk of that. The suggestion that
people telling lies to voters is a novel and catastrophic threat is one that's
almost never put in decent historical context, and it seems misleading to
lament a narrow and recent set of changes as though they have no counterparts
in the past of democracy.

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growlist
But I guess the massive, coordinated and extreme FUD from Remain passes
without comment..

