Sure, but feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests is worse than creators making a bit less.
Like the sibling commenter, I don't get it. If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place? And if someone puts a filter on the garbage that reaches impressionable people, then, being so impressionable, won't they be influenced by whoever controls the filter?
It is more to limit a foreign entity's grasp on controlling the mindset of their citizens. You can compare the feeds of teens in China vs the US on TikTok
I hear this concern a lot; but never could quite grasp it.
If the premise is that the mindset of citizens is so easily controllable that a foreign entity can do it, then why is a foreign entity's control of citizens' mindset any worse than domestic entity's control of the same? If people have no protection against the control of their mindset, then does it not follow that their minds will be controlled by _some_ entity? Isn't the game already lost at that point? And are we really discussing whom we would rather surrender our minds to?
> what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?
To provide tools that counter pressures toward tyranny.
> If people aren't trusted to express their will, however ill-informed, fickle and capricious, then what was the point of giving them the vote in the first place?
The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.
Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
> The phrasing here suggests some principle that outweighs societal good.
Yes.
What is the instrument for measuring societal good? And what is the mechanism for acting upon those measurements? My naive understanding is that in a society that purports to be democratic, societal good is expressed through votes (people vote for things they deem to be good, or for people who promise to bring those things about), and the enactment of those measurements is done through the same mechanism.
> Informing voters in good faith helps them wield their voting tools skillfully. Informing voters in other ways yields other outcomes.
Yes. Now we need a mechanism that establishes the goodness of faith of the informer. And if the past five or so years have taught me anything it is that barely anyone who plays professional-league politics speaks in good faith.
Yeah it seems like just another misguided attempt at fixing some issue by the EU. The principal is nice, but the effects and implementation is garbage.
> Sure, but feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests is worse than creators making a bit less.
If you think people are voting "squarely against their own interests," then you probably don't understand their interests.
While no candidate/party is ever a perfect fit, and everyone needs to make at least some compromises, exactly what compromises an individual voter makes is their completely valid choice.
And honestly, lectures about how XYZ represents the voter's interest and they must vote for that candidate otherwise they're somehow "doing it wrong" is itself a class of "feeding impressionable people garbage which then gets them to vote squarely against their own interests."
Yes, usually you have to vote against some of your own interests because no candidate lines up perfectly with your interests.
When people talk about voters voting against their own interests I don't think they usually mean voters who know what each candidate's policies would do for their issues and vote for the candidate who will give them the best overall outcome given that all of the candidates would go against some of their interests.
I think they are usually talking about the voters who don't actually know what a candidate's policies would do for their issues because they have been bombarded with misleading or outright lying ads from other candidates or from PACs or other organizations.
For example in a US Senate race here a couple of years ago I saw a lot of ads from the non-incumbent all focusing on problems of the largest city in the state. The thing is none of these problems had anything to do with the incumbent Senator, nor were they problems that the challenger would be able to do anything about if they won. If the challenger wanted to actually address those problems she should have been running for mayor or city council.
I've met several people who voted for that challenger because they wanted those city issues addressed. They knew she should be bad for other issues they cared about. So they thought they were compromising by giving up those other issues to get a better result on the city issues they cared about.
But since the challenger would not have been able to do anything about those issues but would be able to do harm for the issues they cared about they ended up voting for a candidate that was not better than the incumbent on any issue they cared about and was worse on several.
A particle or a wave. Choose one. Cannot be both. It's travesty against nature.
Is a belief that universal franchise is stupid, but since we are playing that stupid game we should enjoy it's stupid prizes and not cry disinformation every time the voters have the audacity to vote against the preferences of the pseudo intellectual elite that controversial?
Some phds are also impressionable; some of them are even religious, so then I think we should just not vote at all and decide randomly. Will it make much difference?
Designing a voting system that requires an informed objective voter is hard but not impossible.
It would be fun to run a test system in parallel. Try different thing in different locations with each election. (results discarded)
Say, if you want a person to go places and do several things. Surely if you don't pay them for the work you don't get to complaint about quality?
Voting for issues as well or in stead of candidates seems needed. We now have a process to hire an employee. Letting the new hire (temp) figure out how to is pretty silly. They should know what we want. (and get fired if they refuse) Adjusting salary to performance (by popular vote) also seems good.
Lots of bad ideas we can try without doing much harm.
edit:
I forgot, as developers we should attempt to solve the puzzle in code. Voting on things is not new terrain but there remains lots to explore.
It is incompatible with universal franchise because some people jusy don't want to be that kind of viter. And if we are not doing universal franchise let's just go full starship troopers.
The fun of democracy is that some people will just have to suck it up. Not everyone needs to approve of elections by the proverbial battle royal to the death.
I wrote this software I call subjective sort. The algo is this: Everyone gets to chose from just 2 options but they are chosen randomly. So you would get a ballot with Jill Stein and Afroman on it. We give you some time to read/view some about their election program. You pick one, they get +1 the other -1. If there are enough participants this bubbles the list from best to worse. By comparison well informed choices.
The demo sorts countries by population. I don't even know where some of them are but it works.
People do vote against their interests. Full stop. We have agreed there is misinformation. Who is doing it and why? Is it people not in power who have no resources manipulating people in power? Or is it people in power who have the resources manipulating people not in power? The answer is obviously the latter. And if it's people in power doing it, they are doing it for their own good. They are not doing it benevolently.
> People do vote against their interests. Full stop.
If you're not talking about the normal compromises every voter needs to make between competing priorities, then I think you should own your position and advocate that you yourself be given the power to exercise those voters votes on their behalf, since you claim to know what their interests are better than they do.
So do you really think there are no people who have ever voted against their own interests because they were misled, or even lied to?
That doesn’t mean that they should be disenfranchised, but perhaps it’s worth looking into how those people can be better informed, and thus enabled to vote for options that actually align with the outcomes they desire?
> So do you really think there are no people who have ever voted against their own interests because they were misled, or even lied to?
No, but I also don't trust anyone complaining about people "voting against their own interests" to make that determination. That phrase is almost always shorthand for "they didn't vote the way I wanted them to," but often rationalized to not seem so self-serving (e.g. a partisan's biased belief the other side is uniquely full of liars, or that no reasonable person could disagree with them).
Personally, I think you should spend more time worrying if you "were misled, or even lied to."
